The Open Source Advocate

For the past three versions of Ubuntu, I have tested seven news websites to find out if I could watch their video feeds using Ubuntu. You can read the results for 6.10 and 7.04 , and 7.10 . Each time, I was disappointed to learn that a majority of the video feeds did not play correctly on Ubuntu Linux. This time, however, something amazing has happened. I don't know which stars aligned to cause this, but every single news website that I tested with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS now has a correctly working video feed! I wasn't expecting this great of an improvement when I began this series of tests. I always knew that it would happen eventually, but never this quickly. So what is the reason for this change? The video news sites have obviously realized the value of having a cross-platform video player. Market share gains by Linux are still small, so it is more likely the growth of Mac OS that led to this change of thinking. Be sure to thank your local Mac OS user for their help in fo...

For those of you who don't know, Vyatta is an open source network appliance that functions as a router, firewall, and VPN device, all running on a customized version of Debian Linux . I have been following the progress of Vyatta for over a year now, and things are looking very promising. The latest release is called VC4 (Vyatta Community edition) and it includes a bunch of useful new features: New command shell allows you to modify Linux settings and network settings from one common interface Redesign of routing protocol offers greatly improved stability and performance Role-based user access Equal-cost multi-path routing Remote access VPN Support for IP tunneling protocols PPPoE support, commonly used with DSL connections WAN load balancing of outbound traffic across two or more WAN-facing interfaces Quality of Service policies provide congestion management and traffic conditioning As you can see, a lot of exciting changes have been made in the short six months since the previ...

Yesterday we held a release party in Salt Lake City, Utah to celebrate the release of several open source operating systems. The original announcement only mentioned Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and Fedora 9 , but we realized during the party that OpenBSD 4.3 was released on May 1st. We were all happy to celebrate the goodness of open source, without arguing over which distro was better. The Fedora guys showed us some cool improvements, and the Ubuntu guys also demonstrated some neat improvements. The great thing about open source is that all of these improvements will be shared by both distributions in a future release. I want to say thank you to our excellent sponsors who made this party a success. First, the amazing location was provided by the web-development company Code Greene . Second, the delicious Chipotle burritos were donated by the Utah Open Source Foundation , ran by Clint Savage . Lastly, thanks to the Fedora project who contributed funds, and Ubuntu/Canonical who contributed...

Introduction Both Mark Shuttleworth and myself have discussed this idea before. Because Mark brought it up again in a recent interview, I feel compelled to developer this idea further. The main concept is that Linux distributions, and open source in general, have a lot to gain by synchronizing their release schedules. Positive impact on the image of open source Can you imagine the news articles that would be written if Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSuse all released a new version on the same day? Every six months, the world would see that open source has successfully delivered a new version on schedule. Mark Shuttleworth made a great point when he stated : "We know when the next LTS will be probably with better confidence than we know when Windows 7 will ship. I would take that bet." Once the distro releases become synchronized, it would create a huge incentive for upstream projects to synchronize on the same schedule. Currently, we have upstream releases happening all over th...

Or, "Why Red Hat is pursuing the wrong business strategy" Red Hat has recently announced that they have "No plans for a traditional consumer desktop" . Let me explain why I think Red Hat needs to change their business strategy. First, a short history lesson. Before the arrival of Windows NT Server, Novell Netware claimed 90% of the market for PC based servers. However, Netware made a near fatal mistake when they did not provide a GUI interface soon enough. This comes from the same Wikipedia page linked above: While the design of NetWare 3.x and later involved a DOS partition to load NetWare server files, this feature became a liability as new users preferred the Windows graphical interface to learning DOS commands necessary to build and control a NetWare server. So server administrators became familiar with Windows 95 on their desktop, and they naturally preferred Windows NT 4.0 which included the same interface. Challenged by Ubuntu Red Hat is in a similar p...

What if this was your response to the command history meme? $ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn 2184 dir 1631 copy 560 edit 486 type 430 makedir 343 move 281 ipconfig 273 deltree 201 erase 164 format And how come we never see a meme like this? cat /etc/passwd;sudo cat /etc/shadow;netstat -plunt;ifconfig;sudo iptables -L Note: Please do not post funny memes if they have destructive commands. The meme above will display private information about your system that should never be posted online.

When I first tell people about open source software, one of the most common questions I get is this: "I just don't understand why people would create software if they don't get paid for it! How does that work?" This question makes sense, because we all know that people need to make money to provide for their families. And every good capitalist knows that the profit incentive is what drives people to create and innovate. This is true for many industries, but it does not explain why open source software is created. Here is how I answer this question: The birth of an open source project Most open source software projects were created by a programmer who needed a piece of software to accomplish a certain task. Rather than purchasing a commercial software product (assuming that one existed), this programmer decided to create the software from scratch. This programmer might have been paid by their employer to create the software, or the work might have been done on pe...