Blogs

My weekend was a nice balance of relaxation and thinking--provided by a good book (The Unincorporated Man), a trip to the beach, and a very thought-provoking question from a Linux.com reader.

See? I do read your e-mails.

The question came from one Oscar Slone, who wrote:

Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier is a stable fixture in the Linux community, spreading the word about Linux and open source to all who will listen.

Let's talk about windows.

No, not Windows. Windows--the kind made out of glass.

It's been raining a lot here in the Midwest these past couple of weeks, so I have been spending some contemplative moments away from the computer staring out my windows watching the garden grow, or the baby robins figure out how to master flight before the neighbors' cat finds them.

Companies are growing more comfortable with the concept of open source development, but they don't always approach it in the same way. Some try to build communities; some try to work in-house first then slowly branch out, and some just jump in with both feet and swim in the deep end from day one.

A few years back, when I was volunteering at a local hospital's front desk, a delivery courier came in and asked where the lab was, since he had a rush delivery.

As I started to give him directions, I looked down at the package he held, curiosity getting the better of me. Among all of the official print and biohazard warnings, were the words "Live Animals: Leeches." Given that I was sitting in the lobby of a moden health care facility in the early part of the 21st Century, this was a delivery I certainly wasn't expecting.

So far, the response to the new Linux.com has been really positive and, save for a few glitches here and there, we've  been very happy with how the launch has gone thus far. As we transition from launch mode to operations mode, it's worth taking a little time to reflect on what we're going to be doing on Linux.com.

The question has come up from readers and pundits alike about what we hope to accomplish. The most succinct is from Dana Blankenhorn, who asked what community we'd be serving.

The relaunching of Linux.com has been, without a doubt, one of the most challenging professional tasks I have ever been a part of. And I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

The opportunity was stunning--to be part of a team that would take a marquee site that's been a part of the Linux community and infrastructure for years and change it to something even better.

I have a confession to make: I am a map geek.

Even my friends may find this a bit of a surprise; it's not something I generally advertise. Not out of any particular need to keep it secret, mind you, but for the simple reason that maps simply don't come up in conversation very often. My social skills may be awkward, but they're not that bad.

I was wandering through the mall the other day with my youngest, while her older tween sister was off with a friend in a nearby store, shopping.

Going to the mall is a painful process for me because I am an Indiana native with a Y chromosome, and we don't cotton to retail excursions. Get in, find what you need, get out--guerilla-style shopping is our method.

It's been said quite often that the Linux Foundation is going to make the creation of the new Linux.com site as collaborative a process as possible. That means, as I have said quite often, working with the community directly on the IdeaForge site and tapping into the expertise of folks in the Linux and open source spheres who have the knowledge and skills we need.

Here's some insider baseball about the publishing industry.

I was catching up with a friend of mine yesterday, and he asked me how  things were going with my new job at the Linux Foundation. (It's been a while since we talked.)

As tensions flare between Linux, OS X, UNIX, and Windows operating systems on a daily basis, it's good to know that efforts to achieve interoperability still try to reach across the chasm of hostility with the higher purpose of getting computers talking to each other for better business practice.

How's that for a sweeping lead? Melodramatic enough? Yes, I thought so, too.

Since yesterday, quite a few folks have called or e-mailed me to find out just what exactly we at the Linux Foundation have planned for the new Linux.com site. The big question: are we really making this a community-driven site?

Yes, yes we are. And more.

A new study from analyst firm In-Stat makes the dual case that smartphones will make up 20 percent of the total handheld market by 2013, and the operating system that will lead in that segment of the market will be Linux.

LinuxDevices, ever on top of embedded Linux news, reports:

In all of the PR about Red Hat's move from Xen to KVM and the SolidICE/SPICE desktop virtualization tools earlier this week, it almost got missed that when Red Hat starts offering a desktop to sit on a virtual machine, they'd need an actual desktop offering.

Steven Vaughan-Nichols, though, was pretty sharp and noted the distinction--something he confirmed with Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens. By late Summer 2009, there should be a Red Hat deskop product ready for market.

We have a great thing in Linux, but the question I have is, how do we as a community introduce the real newcomers to programming to the joys of the operating system?

The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed a few... changes to the Linux Developer Network site that happened overnight.

This is a true story.

If you noticed that LDN was a little quiet last week, it was because my wife and I were out of town last week--way out of town. Our destination was Addis Abeba, Ethiopia, where we were to bring home our new seven-year-old daughter.

One of the coolest things about the Internet for me personally is that it lets you travel the world, yet can always bring you home in an instant. This may sound corny, but it never fails to amaze me, especially when I am far from home, as I am now.

Today I find myself in Amsterdam for a stopover before I continue on to Addis Abeba tomorrow. This is the culmination of a long personal journey, but even as I travel, the connections of the Internet have enabled me to stay in touch with my work and family.

I'm not fixated on Eclipse; really, I'm not.

My recent discussions about IDEs vs. text editors led me to bring up the Eclipse Project as an example, which in turn led to a bit of revisionist history on the true origins of Eclipse, with the inevitable correction. And that, I thought, was that.

Then I find out that for the past few months, the developer team from the Russian Academy of Sciences has been working on a plug-in for Eclipse that enables C/C++ developers to use LSB tools right inside the Eclipse IDE.

It was one of those weeks when the surprise gifts just kept on coming, so I think we can count it as a positive for Linux.

First up, and most exciting to me, was the arrival of KDE 4.2. KDE 4.2 really lives up to the potential of the KDE 4 series, and the KDE team deserves a big congrats for getting this release out the door.

An editor's work is never done... we're constantly going around fixing things, especially written things, around us. My wife once lamented that if I owned a red pen, every magazine and newspaper in the house would be awash in a sea of crimson ink.

Well, I'd have to say that for January, these past few days have certainly been chock full o' Linux news. And not just any news: a big Linux conference, a significant licensing shift for a big-name Linux library, layoffs in Redmond, and--perhaps most earth-shattering of all--Bdale Garbee got his beard shaved off for charity.

Today's surprising news of 5,000 Microsoft jobs cut might be good news or bad for Linux, depending on how you look at it.

Microsoft's stock had already dropped 8 percent at the time of this writing, by posting a profit of just 47 cents per share, under the projected 49 cents.

A quick follow up on my earlier post about the state of Linux development (itself a follow up of David Goemans' post on "Linux Development, is it ready for mainstream?"), the question must be asked: why isn't there a solid IDE for the Linux platform?

You might not have noticed it, but yesterday was a first for LDN. For the first time, we were privleged to post the first unsolicited community article on our site.

"DVCS Round-Up: One System to Rule Them All?--Part 1" was submitted by German developer Robert Fendt. He didn't ask permission, we didn't ask him to write the article... he just did it. And, since this is a three-part article, he'll be doing it again.

I've been following Questioning the Norm lately, after a colleague pointed me to it right before the holidays. The author, David Goemans, posts a nice blend of insightful articles and whimsical cartoons to keep things entertaining. (His recent depiction of how a certain distribution picks their color scheme was funny and dead-on... I forwarded it to that distro's community manager and he liked it, too.)

A big part of what the Linux Foundation staff does is find as many ways to communicate the benefits of Linux to as many people as possible. And when I write "as many ways," I don't just mean with a lot of different articles on LDN (though that's a part of it): I mean through as many channels as is humanly possible.

Yesterday, Nokia made the big-splash announcement that beginning with version 4.5, the Qt application framework would now be licensed under the LGPL v 2.1 license, instead of GPL v2. In doing so, it free up Qt for use by a lot more vendors.

Being less free, it seems, made Qt more open.

This was cheery news: Channel Insider just announced the results of their 2009 Market Pulse Survey, where solution providers were asked "which vendors they thought would go out of business or be acquired in 2009."

On the predicted chopping block from the open source industry were Sun Microsystems (coming in at number 7) and Novell (coming in at number 1). 25 percent of survey respondents had predicted the demise of Novell in the coming year.

Here's a funny thing... in October, the same month OpenOffice.org 3.0 was released, Novell's chief OpenOffice.org (OO.o) contributor, Michael Meeks, posted a blog entry that--after a detailed statistical analysis--came to the conclusion that “OO.o is a profoundly sick project.”

In what is a bit of an oddity in my family of entirely right-handed people, both of my daughters have turned out to be lefties.

You may have heard that the Linux Foundation launched its own video site last month. We're pretty excited about it, since it will afford the community a great opportunity to start sharing knowledge about Linux in yet another medium.

With apologies to my boss, a story in today's Wall Street Journal has me thinking that the future of Linux deployment might perhaps be even better than he predicted.

Lately my section of the Midwest has been bombarded with one of the worst things a winter season can deal out: freezing rain. From those of you in warmer climes who have not experienced the joys of this fun-fest, it's basically when it starts to rain in warmer air up in the atmosphere. As the rain falls into colder air below (around the 0° C mark), it hits solid objects like trees, power lines, streets and immediately turns to ice.

This morning, before I sauntered into the teeming hub of control for the Linux Developer Network, I performed what has become a semi-weekly ritual here at the Proffitt home: the return of a watched DVD to its home company. But today, along with the movie, I also placed two envelopes with empty printer cartridges and a survey about my auto repair shop in the mailbox as well. And it struck me, as I closed the mailbox door and put the flag up, that there has been a remarkable sea change in the way the US Postal Service has had to do business in the last few years.