Richard A. Johnson

Yes, as many of you have read recently, Canonical has created a deal with Yahoo! to provide the default search for Firefox in the Lucid release. I decided that I would sit back and parse not only the information that Canonical has put out, but also the information I am reading on the web, Twitter, Identi.ca, and mailing lists. To be honest, I was actually surprised that a large scale attack or a FUD campaign never started over this, and I feel there just might be a turning point in all of this. Before I go on, let me throw a bit of a disclaimer in here as to hopefully not provide a lash back against either Canonical or Ubuntu.

Disclaimer

1. I am not an employee of Canonical, I receive zero money from them for anything I do.
2. I am not a speaker on behalf of the Ubuntu project nor the Ubuntu community.
3. I speak for myself and nobody else.

OK, I think I covered the grounds. I know this post has the potential to either be popular or very unpopular. I am not here for a popularity contest, so if it sinks or swims, I do not care. I just want to provide my opinion of the deal and the atmosphere I have experienced since I first got involved in Linux some 17 years ago.

I personally think this deal between Canonical and Yahoo! is a good one, and to be honest, I wouldn’t mind seeing more of these deals. I wouldn’t mind seeing a deal with Google, Ask, Bing, or whatever else there is out there. The reason I like this deal is that it brings the potential of hiring more developers for the Ubuntu project. Seeing as I am a Kubuntu user and developer, I would love to see some of the money make its way into Kubuntu. Wait a second, did you just say Bing? Isn’t that the search engine, or rather the decision engine, ran by that big evil empire known as Microsoft? Oh boy, how many of you just went, “WTF IS WRONG WITH THIS IDIOT?” I am sure some of you did, and that was to be expected. I mean, Canonical did strike a deal with Yahoo!, and for some reason, many of you feel that Yahoo! is now Microsoft, or at least powered by Microsoft. If you read more than a couple of blog posts here and there, and dive into the news by not only Yahoo! and Microsoft, but read the stuff by the WSJ, NYT, and more. You will see for one, this deal has yet to be approved by the powers to be, and who knows if it will. Saying that Yahoo! is powered by Microsoft is not only incorrect, but it can be construed as either trolling or FUD at best.

You see, I have been around this Linux community for the better part of 17 years. There were good years and plenty of bad years. There were two things that always stood out during these years.

1. Free is on one side of the fence and open source on the other side, in other words a split camp with common goals.
2. Microsoft is a big and evil empire

So, Microsoft is big and evil, and don’t think I could disagree with that statement, and they haven’t proved themselves worthy of us removing this title, or whatever we want to call it. How many of you actually feel that striking this deal with Yahoo! is striking a deal with Microsoft? Don’t be shy, I have seen you on Twitter and Identi.ca stating the same, and on the Ubuntu Developers Mailing list as well, oh and on IRC. How many of you use Dell equipment? HP? IBM? Intel? I could keep going, but I wanted to kind of use companies that Canonical has worked with that Microsoft has worked with as well. How many you out there love your new Intel i7? Why? Don’t you remember the late 90’s when Microsoft was driving Intel to only do things a certain way that would benefit Microsoft only? How many of you are driving a Ford? Shoot, how many of you own a car? How many deals do they have with Microsoft? What about that bicycle, as I know there are a few of us nuts who prefer to ride instead of drive? Your TV? Cable? Shop at Best Buy? Oh man, I could keep going. How many of you just went, “WTF DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH THE PRICE OF TEA IN <nsert county so I don’t offend anyone>?” It has a lot to do actually, and yes it is probably beating yet another dead horse. The reasoning I see a lot of with dealing with $X who in-turn has a deal with Microsoft, in this case Yahoo!, in many cases can be seen as hypocritical. Imagine a life if you only dealt with companies or people that didn’t have a deal with Microsoft. For those of you against this and use Google, not to long ago Google made a deal with Twitter who already had a deal with Microsoft in terms of searching. Did you just switch your default search engine because of that? How about Microsoft and Facebook? Strategic alliance between Microsoft and O’Reilly? Gonna stop reading O’Reilly books now? Sugar CRM? Xen Source? And the list goes on.

Let me cover those of you who are using System 76 or Zareason, or some other Linux only manufacturer, that want to keep the attack going possibly on the deal. Ever consider the hardware that is used in those systems? I know System 76 uses, or was using, MSI equipment. Guess what, big Microsoft deal there. I don’t care what it is, there is a damn good chance you are using something right now that has struck a deal with Microsoft.

Is this the year of the Linux desktop?

or…

Is Linux ready for the mainstream?

Two of the most sickening questions I have seen for over a decade. The answer will always be “NO!” until we realize we need to step from underneath this rock we, yes we, have put ourselves. We have this great product, but if we continue being split on whether the Free Software side or the Open Source side is the correct side, or we shouldn’t be doing these types of deals, let’s just keep our mouths shut and enjoy this lovely rock canopy we have created for ourselves. Oh, here comes a big bomb, Novell. I am not about to rip on Novell, sorry Boycott Novell. I do not agree with their merger whatsoever, but I am a first hand witness of the good that has actually come out of the deal. Guess what Novell is doing that we aren’t right now? They are showing large companies, Fortune 500 and then some, that there is a choice out there, there is more than just Microsoft for your infrastructure. I went to their IT In Action tour here in Chicago last year. Granted I didn’t appreciate it when they said, “Microsoft is now the largest provider of Linux service,” nor did I like when one of their speakers decided to take off his jacket and reveal this nasty Detroit Red Wings hockey jersey (/me points at the Ubuntu Michigan people with a grin). What I did like, and I was wicked impressed with, were these people who were almost to the point of bashing Linux before the event started, to being super stoked over the Linux platform and the tools that Novell had when it was all over. Here I was an Ubuntu guy, and they knew that and welcomed me with open arms, who came in defending Linux and left helping some of these companies switch to, or look at the possibilities of switching to Linux. So thanks Novell for helping me get a few consulting gigs out of the tour.

I feel we, the Linux community, need to unite more so than we have. Not a fan of President Obama, but last night during his State of the Union address, he talked about reaching over those party lines. I think we need to do the same thing. Hey, if Microsoft is evil and they won’t reach their hand out, then why shouldn’t we try? OK, no more politics, OK maybe one more. Let’s tear down this wall! OK, that was lame, but I had to do it because it made me chuckle a little. I am not saying lets sell out to Microsoft, because that is definitely the last thing I want. You see us Linux people look at the big guy and concentrate on trying to make them look bad. In my eyes, we aren’t winning that battle, and while we keep carrying it forward, there is this person in the middle who is seemingly getting bigger and bigger every time they announce an iSomething. So instead of spending membership money to stand out in front of some silly event with a sign, lets think of better ways to use it. There are so many people out there who see people with signs picketing something, and a majority of the time these people go unnoticed, except for that one rogue honk, which believe it or not wasn’t supporting your campaign.

OK, that should be it. I am sure it is all confusing, so please feel free to respond anyway you feel is right in the comments. Thank you, and I apologize for causing you to spend this time possibly reading absolutely nothing.

Recently I have really gotten into cycling, not just for recreational use, but also for competitive reasons. I am definitely new to their community unlike I have been in the free software community now for more than 15 years. The one thing I noticed is that their community is exactly like ours. Everyone is very welcoming and friendly and it is easy to find a spot just for you. I have done my first 3 group rides within the past week. A group ride is where a bunch of road cyclists get together and do a nice long, fast paced, ride in a group, or what is commonly referred to as a pace line in cycling.

The first ride I went on was with what are called leg shavers. People who are about as close to Lance Armstrong, Levi Leipheimer, Alberto Contador, and others. They ride super fast and they know what they are doing. Well, I definitely didn’t fit in with this crowd but they didn’t discourage me from trying to ride with them at all. Actually some of these semi-pro to professional cyclists took some time with me to teach me the basics, something they probably learned many years ago.

The second ride I went on was with leg shavers as well with a local racing team, which I will probably join in the upcoming months. On Monday they went out for what is called a recovery ride. This type of ride is a slower paced ride with very high RPMs, or cadence in the cycling world. After racing on Saturday and Sunday, these athletes need to keep their legs, lungs, and hearts fresh, so they do a somewhat easy ride. This ride was considered a “no-drop” ride. This means that they will not let you drop off and will always help you through. Now those of you who know me, know that I am a fairly large guy. I am not obese, but I used to play football, did wrestling and martial arts, lifted weights forever. I was always into getting bigger. Well because of this, my cardio is absolute garbage. I can ride for 100 plus miles, but I can’t do it all that fast. This ride was my fastest paced ride at the distance we did to date. There was a woman who made sure I didn’t drop the entire time, her name was Sandy and I am forever in her debt as she was not only patient, but she was a ton of help teaching me the ropes.

The third ride was last night. A nice 31 mile ride that is by far the hilliest ride I have done to date. I didn’t even know we had hills like this in the Chicagoland area. I was great with rolling hills, flats, and downhills. Because I have a solid 220 plus pound body, I can easily toast a lot of people down hill that we were riding with. Now, what goes down, must come up, and my lord did it ever come up. There were 3 hills, and all of them had those scary movie names too. Devils Back, Heart Attack Hill, and I can’t remember the other. Well, those hills kicked my ass. I dropped into the lowest gears I had, and I run triples thankfully. I had dropped from doing 18 mile per hour to about 7 miles per hour, I pushed and I pushed, I saw dots, I felt sick, and my legs were on fire. To my rescue to help me up the hill and make sure I didn’t fall back, another woman cyclist. Sandy was also riding with us that night, but I told her to not fall back because of me, I know the route and I will catch up. Thankfully she listened and got a good workout. The lady who did help me was just as friendly, very motivational, and a lot of fun to ride with.

Since these 3 rides, the last 2 I have made some cool friends and already they are emailing me asking me to come out for a bike ride this weekend and a barbecue. Really cool, and this is the type of stuff I really need, the motivation and camaraderie that will help me from burning out in the open source community. There you go Jono, add cycling to your list of burnout preventors As you can see, they welcome me with open arms the same exact way the open source community has as well. Cycling and Ubuntu are so darn close in community representation that I am falling in love with both more and more every day now.

Another moral to this story, which has become somewhat of a hot topic over the past couple of years deals with women. I am here to tell you that women can be as strong and even stronger then men, in so many ways. When I say stronger, I don’t necessarily mean strength. The past 2 rides I have done has given me even more appreciation for the women in our communities. I am proud to say that I was at the brink of quitting and had women come to my rescue. For those of you out there that want to bash women and say they don’t belong, I know some on bikes that are waiting for you to mount up, and I know plenty who have their IDEs fired up ready to code you a paperbag to crawl into. So I had 2 women stick with me during my rides and help me through it, help me succeed. I had women in the open source community do the same. One of them is my good pointy stick buddy Sarah who probably helped me more than Jonathan Riddell, Brandon Holtsclaw, and Daniel T. Chen put together.

COMMUNITY! COMMUNITY! COMMUNITY!

Yesterday the Floursh Conference wrapped up. What an exciting two days. I kicked off Friday’s events by giving a presentation on KDE and Kubuntu, and I was really impressed with the Friday morning turnout. With all of the people sitting in on the conference, I am sure there was a bit of revenue loss in a couple of Chicago companies

This years conference had some really awesome speakers, and I sat in on a couple of talks that really impressed me. I got to meet some really great people, and before the pictures start showing up, I got kissed by a Spanish guy. I love you Roberto!!! Last night they held a social mixer where everyone, 21 and over, hung out and enjoyed some pizza, beer, and good conversations.

I was able to meet and talk to:

• Massimo Banzi who co-founded the Arduino Project
• Christoph Lameter of the Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board
• David Heinemeier Hansson who created Ruby on Rails
• Steve Coast who created OpenStreetMap
• and others…

Christoph has recently moved to Chicago, so that puts 2 Debian “old-timers” near by and Christoph came up with a good idea that we need to run past the other old-timer, Dirk Eddelbuettel. He brought up the idea of starting a Debian Users Group here in Chicago, and yesterday after speaking with a few of the other Linux hackers here in Chicago, they were interested as well.

Like I said, the talks were great. One of my favorites was the OpenStreetMap talk that Steve gave and it was absolutely brilliant. I would have to say his talk probably motivated more people into contributing. Chicago even has a Map Group who meets up. This Thursday they are having Mappy Hour at the Map Room. I think this summer you will see a bunch of us on our bikes with our GPS units touring the greater Chicagoland area.

Another talk that I really liked was the one by Daliah Saper, an attorney, of the Saper Law Offices. She broke down open source licensing and explained how to use it legally and broke it down to where morons like me could understand it.

In closing yesterday there was an Open Source Panel in which it was Christoph Lameter, Daliah Saper, David Heinemeier Hansson, Cedric Hurst, and myself. We took questions that were asked during registration and through Twitter as well as fielded questions from the audience. Great responses. I think my favorite exchange during the panel was when someone asked “What dynamic language do you think will be the big one moving forward?” Of course David responded “RUBY!” Christoph of course responded “C!” Cedric went wild with a few languages. I sided with Christoph and C, but had to poke some fun at David and said “NOT RUBY! The only thing I got from it was the fail whale. My honest answer was of course both Python and Ruby, as the buzz around them today are big, especially here in Chicago.

I want to say thank you to all of the Flourish organizers, sponsors, speakers, and attendees. It was a great conference this year and I am definitely looking forward to next years!

After reading Jorge’s blog post titled Amazing open source image resizing technology, I decided to download and install the new plugin into Gimp and give it a try. The outcome, not to shabby, but not even close to great at the same time. Take a look at the before and after images below:

Before

After

The things that stick out graphically after using the liquid plugin is the set of weights in the background, one is considerably smaller than the other. The other thing is look at the collar the dog is wearing, looks like he chewed it up. Yet, the dogs head looks fine visually. Another downside, a 1600×1200 jpg file before using the plugin, is 484k in size. After using the liquid plugin and knocking it down to 1024×768, the size almost doubled to 836k.

Still pretty cool, and I am sure after further tweaking and playing around it will get better. One thing to note, is that I haven’t played with all of the available settings when using the plugin either. The main reason for this plugin from the previous videos I had seen, was say you want to keep the width at 1600, but wanted to shrink the height to 768, this plugin would allow you to do it without skewing the image to bad. Which that impressed me, however the increase in size was a little bad. I want to see some cool panoramic images of the ocean, or mountains, or rolling hills and see what the outcome is.

UBUNTU!

Only two Linux distributions participated in our Battle of the Distros competition. The two competitors were Red Hat Linux and Ubuntu Linux. Representatives from both distributions had an opportunity to give a fifteen minute presentation on why their distribution is best. While both distributions had its advantages, the audience chose Ubuntu Linux as the overall best distribution.

Earlier this year the University of Illinois at Chicago’s ACM group put on a very nice “Open Source in the Business” conference. The conference, called Flourish, went off without a hitch and had plenty of people show up. Last I heard roughly 200 people showed up, which isn’t bad at all, considering they held it on Easter weekend, yes the one Easter weekend where all religions who celebrate it had it at the same time. Not to bad.

Ubuntu vs. Red Hat. It was a great opportunity to show off Ubuntu as well as Red Hat (Fedora) as two amazing operating systems. Tom “spot” Callaway from Red Hat give his part about Red Hat and did an amazing job. He showed off some coolness with Fedora that made me actually like the way Gnome looked. What started out as a competition really turned into a pretty cool little talk between the two distros. Ubuntu Chicago gave their talk, after a five minute episode of “Ubuntu doesn’t like this LCD.” Tom fired up Fedora and right away it was up an rocking on the LCD. OUCH! So, to prove our point, we simply asked, “Who here is using Ubuntu or one of its projects?” Pretty much everyone raised their hand. And out of all of them people who raised their hand, I can comfortably say Xubuntu was the majority. Xfce and Xubuntu are pretty big here in Chicago among the developers it seems. Our other point was a funny really. We googled “Ubuntu sucks” and “Red Hat Sucks”, and Google showed that Red Hat had roughly 400,000 more hits for the search topic Thanks to Tom of course and to the Ubuntu Chicago guys who kicked arse. Truthfully, Tom was outnumbered, but I feel that overall his presentation(s) were excellent, and Tom if you just happen to read this, Ubuntu Chicago would love to call it a tie and share the award with you. Even though we offer the battle as a tie, don’t think we won’t rub it in every chance we get when you are around

Also, who took pictures of Tom and I in a deep, loving, embrace? It was a show of Linux force If you have those pictures, because I seen the flash bulbs (so 1970s) going off, send them my way or link me to them please. You can view pictures as well as the talks via Google Video by visiting the Flourish Media page.

Sorry for the double post, but low and behold this just came across Akregator.

With the recent news of several Linux vendors entering into partnership agreements with Microsoft (Novell, Linspire, Xandros), there has been much debate recently about two factions of Linux forming. Saying that Linux is going to be torn in two, makes for good press and lively debates, but this is certainly nothing new for Linux. There are far more material splits today in the Linux world, such as Debian vs RPM, KDE vs GNOME, Distro A vs Distro B, and so on. These divisions are quite material, and dilute significant energy and efforts across competing standards. However, we accept this as the price we pay for freedom of choice.

Note the There are for more material splits today in the Linux world, such as Debian vs RPM, KDE vs GNOME, Distro A vs Distro B, and so on. THOSE ARE CHOICES, NOT SPLITS!.

You have made your bed, lie in it. Don’t sit here and try to make excuses now and try and point the finger at other distributions. You talk about this Moral High Ground that some distributions are standing upon and then claim that some of these same distributions also link to tools that allow illegal installation of codecs and drivers. Bah humbug! I am willing to bet you are speaking of Automatix, in which not many developers I know like it, use it, advocate it, support it, and the list goes on. I know that Ubuntu, Debian, and Red Hat don’t link to it at all, and if there was a moral high ground, these 3 are standing proudly on top of it.

Quit defending you decision, or trying to, and then spewing opinions and not facts about the situation. You said you are fine with us disagreeing with your deal, yet you defend it every chance you get.

NOTE 1: I do understand there is a demand for the proprietary codecs and drivers, however I don’t feel we should sign a deal with the devil in order to provide them. And what does signing a deal with Microsoft have to do with proprietary codecs and drivers? Microsoft doesn’t create any of these items that are in demand.

NOTE 2: GPLv3 to be released in 24 hours!