Originally published August 22nd, 2007:

http://talk.bmc.com/blogs/blog-carl/steve-carl/The-Secret-Linux-Agenda

I know it says "Linux" on the title, but there is plenty about Open Source to make it relevant to the theme here....

Now it can be told for the first time anywhere: the secret agenda of the Linux community is... is... ahhhhhggg! They got me..... Its all going dark.... sinking....

OK. Fine. I lied. There is no Linux agenda. Well. Maybe one: to be the best Operating System the Open Source community can make it be. And even then the BSD and OpenSolaris camp are going to be wanting to voice an opinion....

Here is what got me to thinking about this.

I was doing the work on the two laptops that I posted about over at on-being-open. That post, in a circular posting kind of way , was a followup to my last post here here about installing Mint 3.0 on a Dell C400 trash-laptop. The post in turn was a follow-up to... oh never mind. Lets just say I have been on a theme lately.

I realized at some point along the install that the Dell C400, with it's Orinoco based TrueMobile 1150 Wifi card was a better Fedora 7 platform than the IBM X30 with its Atheros based Dlink PCMCIA Wifi card. That in turn had me thinking about the purity... or purism.. something... of one Linux Distro over another. Mint 3.0, which was on the Dell C400 hard drive would work just fine on the IBM. Mint would not care what the Wifi chip was either way. Of the two distros I was working with on the two laptops, only Fedora is persnickty like that. There is a reason why Fedora is that way. More about that in a bit.

I did what I suggested I might in that on-being-open post: I pulled the hard drives out of each laptop, and I switched them.

The 40GB Hitachi with Mint 3.0 went from the Dell C400 into the IBM X30. Wifi chip went from Orinoco to Atheros

The Samsung 80GB went from the IBM X30 to the Dell C400. Wifi Chip went from Atheros to Orinoco.

Batteries in. Plugs in. Power on. Boot.

That was it. They both came up, they both figured out their new hardware situation. They both reconfigured what they needed to. They both found the home Wifi network, and auto-configured to join, even though they had just switched (among other things) the chip on the Wifi cards. It was brain dead easy. Hardest bit was keeping track of the tiny screws for the disk cradles when the cats were trying to help. It turns out all projects require cats to help, at least according to them.

Take That Other OS's!

I have developed a rep in some places as having gone over to the dark side. In this case, Apple and OS.X. I have certainly made no secret that I am a fan of many things Apple. I have been informed by those who dislike Apple that just saying that it has chewy BSD goodness at its OS.X core is not enough. Be that as it may, I never even considered an Apple before they made it's core something I trusted. Mac OS9 and its predecessors may have been perfectly good OS's but I never liked them much. I'm pretty old school. With no command prompt to ease my way in, I always was lost on a Classic Mac. One time in the early 1990's it took me over an hour to eject a disk out of a Mac. I ended up taking it apart. Turns out I was supposed to drag the icon of the disk to the trash can icon. I never would have done that, fearing it would delete the data on the disk. But I digress.....

This disk switching is a case where Linux does something that neither Apple nor MS Windows will. Not can: will.

Linux boots in the new hardware because it has no axe to grind. No master to please. No agenda. It can focus instead on trying to do the right thing... which in this case is merely to boot. It does more than boot though. After the two laptops are booted, things like the 3d desktop (Beryl) still works on both platforms. It not only works, it works well. It dealt with the BIOS change, the graphic chip change, the Wifi chip change... all of it. No muss or fuss.

I, as a customer am having a very nice experience here.

I noted in the X30/C400 post that despite coming from two different vendors, the hardware was similar. Same 1.2 Ghz processor. Same 1 GB of memory. Same 1024x768 screen size. Same general target market: the year of 2002's Sub-notebook market.

I guarantee that I could not have done the disk swap thing between the IBM and the Dell with MS Windows XP and had it work. That would have required all sorts of non-fun things, like re-installing the OS, or at least pre-running sysprep to undo the way MS Windows has tied itself to the specific hardware. OS.X would not have booted at all of course: it only works on Apple hardware (not counting some serious hackery out there).

It is not even that MS Windows can not boot on more generalized hardware: when one first installs MS Windows, a generalized version does the installation. There are many recovery disks like Bart PE that run generalized MS Windows OS stacks. In fact, I believe the Bart PE is a version of MS Windows called Windows PE.

The reason MS Windows would not boot in this example is that once installed MS Windows does not want to be moved till you can re-verify your right to install it anywhere. And that is MS's right. They wrote the EULA. Running MS Win means you agree to the hassle that implies should you want to change your hardware. Vista is worse in this regard by all reports. MS is not targeting people like me who do stuff like this as a customer anyway. Not any more. Maybe not since DOS days...

This non-booting without major incantations is not a premium end-hacker-user experience. Not like this hard drive swap of the X30 and the C400, where everything just works.

I have moved harddrives much further afield than these two similar computers, and had the same experience. From an ancient Compaq M300 to a eMachine 5312 to a brand new (at the time) Toshiba to the IBM X30. Now the Dell C400. That 80 GB Samsung drive gets around.

Whurley Gets It

If you listen to the videocasts Whurley recently posted, one of the things he and Cote talk about as it related to Open Source is that it is about support. With Open Source, the customer is always right. Even if the customer had to write the feature themselves. Open Source gives a customer options.

Example: If an Open Source tool does almost what a customer needs or wants, they can:

Ask the creator of the code to add the feature

Commission someone to add the features they really want.

Do the code work themselves, in house.

Since they wanted this new feature bad enough to write it, what are the chances someone else wanted or would benefit from the new feature? Pretty good, I'd say.

The funny thing was that, in most cases, Open Source is not about the customer necessarily wanting the source code. Whurley points out the discrepancies between source and binary downloads of most products as an example. Most downloads are of the binaries.

In my day job in R&D Support, having access to the Linux code has meant having access to the ultimate manual. We have not used it often, but if you look back in the early TalkBMC "Adventures" posts about some of the debugging we were doing with NAS, we were in the source code trying to figure out what the programmed behavior was so that we could have intelligent conversations about it with the developer.

I used to do the same thing with VM on the mainframe, reading the dump and the source code before I reported a problem so that I was sure what I was reporting actually was a problem.

Distro Focus

Another thing I have been thinking about and posting on a fair amount recently: What the focus of various distributions are. Here there are agendas, at least of a sort. Not hidden ones though.

Example: What does Fedora want to be?

I spent a great deal of time with Fedora over the years, and there are things I really like about it, but after using Mint 3.0 for a while I have come to the place where some of the purity really gets old when all I want is a working Linux computer.

I had hoped that Fedora 7, what with it's LiveCD and merging of the "Extras" with "Core" and all, was moving more in the direction of Ubuntu and other easy to use Distros. That projects that were "tainted" in the eyes of the Distro would be dealt with in some similar way as Ubuntu and it's "Restricted Source Manager". I was disappointed though.

Fedora views their stance about not including certain projects as being a good thing. Fedora 7 does not support either the Atheros Wifi cards, or the Intel Wifi cards out of the box but does support the Orinoco based cards because of the question of Open Source.

Huh? Didn't I just finish saying that Open Source was all about being easy and having nice customer experiences and all? Am I bifurcated?

Two Things Can Be True, Even If They Seem to be the Opposite

In Open Source, both of these statements about customer support are true. It is all about Point of View.

Fedora won't include anything that is not 100% open source, and in the case of the Intel and Atheros drivers, while the drivers are Open Source, the firmware of the cards is not. They are vendor provided binaries that the Open Source drivers load when the card is initialized. No source code to the card firmware. The card manufacturer has decided that having the firmware code would mean that their competitors would have too big an advantage on them. They are therefore not 100% Open Source, and Fedora wants vendors to get the message that not being Open means not being included. The Fedora FAQ says what Fedora wants to be when it says in reference to a closed standard:

"...we'd much rather change the world instead of going along with it."

I find that deeply admirable, and it is one of the reasons I stick with at least one system running it, despite the frustrations of hacking Fedora from time to time to get my Wifi cards going. As an end user, I can not really tell the difference between an Atheros chipped Wifi Card and an Intel one. Whatever market advantage vendors think they derive from having closed source firmware, from the end user point of view, it all looks the same. Wifi is a commodity item. It hooks up laptops and iPhones to Wifi access points. It lets me access the well known series of tubes we call the Interweb. In fact, the real value to me is not anywhere inside the commodity Wifi chip. It is how well the antenna is designed and placed in the case!

Mint does not get to claim such Open Source purity, and instead uses the Ubuntu Restricted Source Manager. It tells you that you have an impure system, but it loads everything up if you tell it to, and away you go. You, the end user, know which vendors are being sticks in the mud, but it does not stop you from getting going.

The core difference is that Ubuntu will supply things that are free and unencumbered, but do not have to be Open Source. This difference is making a big difference to Ubuntu and its kin. Ubuntu is always the top Distro at Distrowatch.com whenever I look, and has twice the download numbers Fedora has.

POV and Pol

Polarization that is.

I am still trying to get my head around some of this.

As I have said here, I take it as axiomatic that open is better than closed (tm).

It can be deduced from the above example of Mint vs. Fedora that there are degrees of being open. Fedora goes for purity of Openness, and is lampooned in some corners because of how hard it is to get going on any hardware that does not match the 100% open criteria. The Dell C400 works great with Fedora because every bit of hardware in it has a totally Open Source solution.

Ubuntu and its kin like Mint work far more easily but some criticize them because they have given in to the closed source forces of darkness and evil, and shipped Binary bits.

This is not even a new issue: When IBM started to pull the source code to VM on the mainframe, a huge outcry from the customer base ensued. "OCO is LOCO" was the badge at SHARE. I still have mine.

Fedora and its goals are laudable and I support them. At the same time, when my brother needed a Linux computer, I built him one based on Ubuntu. He would not care one whit about the purity of the Open Source. He just wants Google Earth to run.

These POV issues all show up in discussions about whose Open Source license is better. Whurley is currently pointing in his blog at a poll and panel about that at SXSW .

I know this is not all that politically correct (but then, I rarely am)... but I think Open/open is better than closed. Any open. Any spelling or capitalization.

At the same time, I am always a bit dismayed by the signal to noise ratio of the Internet on things like this. I have said it before, and I say it again: I'm really old. I remember when you could read Netnews newsgroups, and get useful information, and help from a community of like minded people. A time before the noisy, just-like-to-tear-things-down-no-matter-what-they-are types moved in, and destroyed Netnews. The downside of being open on Netnews was needing to have a news client like Pan with a good killfile / filter function.

Spam certainly took (and still takes) advantage of the openness of the email transport of the Internet, reducing the value of email, and in some cases doing real harm.

I see the move to Open Source for anyone doing it as having an issue like this. No matter which license one chooses, someone...maybe many someones... maybe really loud and self righteous someones, will yell to the rafters about how using license X means one is being less than open, or less than perfect. Google said that a guiding principal of their company was to "Not Be Evil" and every thing they do now gets the "Is that Evil" yardstick hauled out and yammered about.

That high level of noise is not very useful, and can push some away in disgust. In my opinion only: A company does not announce an Open Source direction lightly. Not because of the business risk, but because no matter what you do, in some corner will be the voice saying "You did not do that right". No matter what you did.

Personal Example

To close this thought and post out: I was talking the other month to someone that was getting ready to open source some code they had written. A very useful tool. Their number one fear: that the code they had written would be savaged by the folks they were giving it away to. Sort of like:

"Hi. Here is this tool. It did this useful thing for me. If you want it, you can have it, and the code to it, in case you would find it useful."

"Oh. My. Ever. Loving. STARS! I can't BELIEVE you gave this away! What a piece of junk! Where did you learn how to code: A fish and tackle shop? Look at this DO loop! Have you ever seen such a thing in your LIFE. And these comments. What language is this?......" On and on.

Some build. Some innovate. Some tear down and destroy.

For everyone like that critic though, there will be those that thank you for taking the time, and being willing to share. One just has to have a mental killfile / filter.

For all its problems: many self inflicted, I still think Open is better. I'm a glass-half-full type. I also remind myself all the time that despite appearances, Open Source is not a computer religion. It is just a good idea.

And it is... The Secret Linux Agenda