by Carla Schroder
Managing Editor
Last year Ken Starks asked a penetrating and simple
question at the Second Annual Linux Foundation Collaboration
Summit. It was a panel discussion with an open mike for audience
questions, so Ken took the opportunity to
ask this panel of industry heavyweights and supposed Linux
supporters:“My customers can turn on their cable television and in
30 minutes watch five Microsoft Windows commercials. When are IBM
and HP going to put the same things on? When are my customers going
to be able to see about Linux? Television and radio legitimize the
product.”The answers: First, a feeble dodge about how users of Motorola
set-top boxes were already using Linux. But as Ken pointed out, the
Linux part was not visible and users of these boxes have no idea
what’s inside. Then two more panel members chimed in:“Your question really ought to be aimed at the folks
who make money specifically because it’s Linux….”“You won’t see IBM advertising any operating system on
television…you may see us offer solutions, services, and
products…Linux is a component to build other things.”Since then the advancement of Invisible Locked-Up Linux has
accelerated. All kinds of phones and mobile devices, consumer
electronics, and networking gear are using “Linux Inside”. But
they’re keeping it a big secret, or they try to exploit “Linux” for
marketing purposes on non-hackable devices. They’re targeting
Windows users and not supporting Linux clients. They might as well
be closed and proprietary.The Palm Pre is a great example of a vendor that enjoys the
benefits of Linux and FOSS, but doesn’t quite grasp the spirit.
Joey Hess discovered that the Pre’s Linux-based WebOS is a sneaky
little tattletale that sends a torrent of personal data– your
location via GPS, what applications you use and for how long, dmesg
and syslog dumps, and other data, all on your bandwidth– back to
the mother ship.
Palm’s response was sadly predictable, the usual “We’re doing
it for your own good! Really, we are!” Plus this little gem, as
discovered by Jared Newman at PCWorld:“The terms also note that Palm can disclose “any information” to
law enforcement authorities.”Way to take a stand, Palm, I feel so happy knowing that if I
become your customer I can enjoy the additional benefit of being
sold down the river without a warrant and without my knowledge.Linux For Windows
My other current fave is Linux-based devices that do not support
Linux clients. No sync, no management from a Linux machines– and
we’re supposed to be happy with this and praise them for their
Linux creds? As if.Linux as a Brand Name is Pure Gold
There is some serious insanity around this whole “We dare not speak
its name!” meme. Come on folks, I get criticized for seeing
Microsoft thugs lurking behind every bush and rock, but what else
explains this sort of silliness? Linux has all kinds of selling
points that do matter to users of consumer electronics:
- Stable and secure-able
- Lower cost and gadzillions more potential features
- Hackable, for those who want to hack
I grew up in the era of Heathkits, Radio Shack kits, Legos,
Erector sets, Edmund Scientifics, and Shopsmiths. You younguns
don’t believe me, but we could make things, and fix things, and
change things, and we were not assaulted by Ninja Attack Eye Pee
Lawyers. Now vendors want everything to be a black box encased in
layers of NO NO NO DON’T YOU DARE TOUCH! and hackers scare them.
They do not realize it is a mistake to not court early adopters and
hackers, because we are the folks who create buzz and enthusiasm,
and in classic FOSS tradition find bugs and make improvements.Netbooks + Linux = Unbeatable Value
Netbooks are perfect examples of the suits not getting Linux. With
any ordinary Linux distribution you can turn a netbook into a
fully-featured mini-notebook that can do anything its big siblings
can do, within its hardware limitations. So you can’t make movies
for Pixar on a netbook, oh well, but you can do almost everything
else. Put something like Ubuntu
Netbook Remix on a netbook, which is modified for the smaller
screen, and you have unbeatable value. Low cost, unbeatable
portability, support for every kind of networking, productivity
apps, sound and video production, Web surfing, financial apps,
games, and on and on– selling points galore. For vendors that get
it, that is, and don’t ship some weird defective crippled Linux,
and have no idea how to market it anyway. Is it really that hard to
understand?Power to the People
Locking up Linux inside black boxes goes against its reason for
existing in the first place. I wonder if all those people who call
Richard Stallman an outmoded relic and lunatic still think he’s
wack for writing GPL3? This is why I keep talking about not leaving
Linux and FOSS in the hands of big business, and bugging ordinary
individual users to become contributors, and to keep the
non-corporate Linux community thriving. We should have intersecting
interests with our friends the big globalcorps– we want to buy
cool devices to use, and they want to sell them to us. But somehow
that simple equation has become terribly distorted and we no longer
have intersecting interests, but have to watch our backs every
minute because we can’t trust them to not pull some sneaky
exploitive dodge.I don’t know how we arrived at this weird state of affairs, but
at least we have Linux and FOSS on our side, and for that I am very
thankful.*edit*
There are vendors who get it, and next week I’ll talk about some of
them.