These Things Matter To Me

An administrative view of rearranging songs:
How do you set it up?

Last week Magnolia announced plans to open source their social bookmarking software. I haven’t been a big Magnolia user (I use the similiarly-purposed delicious), but not for lack of interest or quality. In fact, two of their biggest cheerleaders, Tara Hunt and Chris Messina have always tempted me to port my delicious data in there, by their association alone, but I never got around to it.

This weekend Selena and I spoke at the charming and hospitable LUG Radio Live USA, in San Francisco, CA. The topic was Choosing between Drupal and WordPress. It was very civil. A few people have asked for the video of our presentation, so I’ve uploaded it above with a Flash embed. More ambitious full-on video file to come later.

(ideally this cat pidgin will be charming, hilarious, and familiar to readers of i can has cheezburger and Anil Dash)

• This commenter on Matt Asay’s InfoWorld blog has a theory that IBM will buy Novell (to get SUSE), that IBM helped Novell buy SUSE, and that ex-IBM execs are already slowly filling Novell VP spots
• Comcast is going to use open source + commercial application Zimbra to manage 12 million + mail accounts
• Ubuntu working with Intel on a mobile/ embedded edition of Ubuntu.
• Sun is helping port OpenOffice on the Mac with two dedicated engineers.
• New York Observer magazine recently relaunched their website using Drupal. With notes on the how. And why yes I will continue to document major commercial implementations of open source software like Drupal until y’all bow down and concede that open source is just fine for “mission critical” applications. Sheesh.

Yesterday I began what will probably end up becoming a series of posts about how y’all need to rethink the meaning of the word “enterprise,” and related, the value of support. In specific, I called out how “Enterprise Linux,” (usually meaning Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell’s Suse/SLES/SLED) is overvalued because the packages you pay for often need to be replaced with packages you don’t pay for.

Another problem with Enterprise Linux is the way it’s sold. You buy the bits and support together. People might think it’s hard for an open source software vendor to just sell the bits, when technically, so much of it is “free,” and its easier to just imagine all those software dollars are actually paying for “support” (representing commercial man-hours, not free) but the simple fact is many organizations would love to pay for the bits they could technically get for free, and just do without the facade of expensive support, when the support they get from other resources is more responsive.

Photohosting site smugmug was in that boat, and blogged about their issues with Novell and Redhat.

…we loved Red Hat Linux, we loved how good they were at building & testing their software, we loved their mechanism for delivering software updates. We just didn’t need support.

We got on our knees, begging and pleading with Red Hat to let us pay for a “software updates only” license. They wouldn’t have it. “Support comes bundled with updates”, I was told, “no ifs, ands, or buts”. I *want* to pay Red Hat for the valuable service they do for us and the community. I just don’t want to pay for the part we don’t need – human support.

I would really like to pay Red Hat for all their hard work building and testing the software. .. It’d be the right thing to do. But Red Hat won’t let me.

The company ended up going with CentOS, a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux I’ll write about another time. Again, you’ll notice the author isn’t trying to avoid paying for the software, he just doesn’t want to pay for a service (”support”) he doesn’t need.

WHAT WE CAN DO

Many of us who use Linux in commercial situations are more than happy to pay for it. Let’s feel comfortable paying for it in different ways. We need to get over the traditional model of a single, central body of developers and supporters being embodied by a single company. There are different currencies and parties involved. Give back to your providers creatively with money, bug fixes, documentation, and sharing your best practicies. Take the time to identify the upstream developers and projects and consider funding them directly. Publicly share your challenges and success stories on the internet, the attention will help future users and the developers by making their project less of an unknown quantity for future users.

But most importantly, be willing to break free of this totally broken tradition of thinking paying a bunch of money to a central body in some way solves your technical problems and protects you. It may make certain people in your organization feel safe, but take the time to run some numbers. What value have you really gotten out of support in the past? Put the burden of determining value on those who sell it.

(Ubuntu Linux CD originally uploaded by excellent Flickr citizen Pen9)

I’m as giddy as the rest of y’all. Yes, Dell will pre-install Ubuntu on Dell hardware.
Some of us have been waiting for this news for a while, either in the affirmative or the negative. After all, it was over a month ago when Dell closed its Linux survey. A bunch of different commercial and community-based distros rallied to get their Linux represented. And then silence. Dell didn’t let us know how, when, or what they’d do with the data. They thanked us, but dat about it.
So it was very exciting to hear this evening first a rumor via Dell, and a confirmation via Canonical that yes, Dell will support Ubuntu.

But let’s be gracious here . DesktopLinux.com wrote “Dell to choose Ubuntu,” in a tone suggesting only one Linux could be chosen. Mos def some of this language is left over from the Dell’s own Linux survey, where one could vote for only one flavor of Linux for Dell to install. But remember bug #1 people. It isn’t that Fedora has majority market share . Let’s hope Dell’s experience of offering Ubuntu is so delightful, they get involved with other flavors of Linux, and get on the right side of bug #1 ;D

Though it took me a little while to identify what exactly was going on on the Full Circle website, I gotta once again give the Ubuntu community credit for knowing how to make it easy to learn about, enjoy, evangelize, and contribute to the Ubuntu Linux distribution and its related projects and goals.

Full Circle is a new free magazine from the Ubuntu community. Full Circle is made up of both a PDF, with a traditional magazine layout that you can download (and print), and web-based content that includes forums and articles in development.

PDF available for download in multiple languages here.

• Parallels Desktop out of beta! (Mac-tel users rejoice, and read pstam’s review)
• You can hack your VMware .vmx file to enable experimental 3D support (very cool of VMware to talk about the semi-underground video making the rounds)
• using MySpace for a VMware/NetApp blog ? (of course!)
• Did you know there is a “major” virtualization conference? It’s called “Virtualization Conference.” really.
• As of February 27th, 2007, 8 of the top 8 vote-getting initiatives on Dell’s IdeaStorm website are about getting Linux pre-installed, other open source software pre-installed, Windows software not-installed, and improving Linux support (sheesh, can the drum beat any louder?)

(original screenshot snagged from Drupal.org’s 5.0 screenshot page)

What’s Drupal? Drupal is open source software. Drupal can be used to manage blogs, communities, newspapers, magazines, forums, wikis, on-line video channels, and other kinds of content. You’ve probably visited a site powered by Drupal, and not even realized it! (’Da Drupes is humble like that.)

A new version of Drupal, Drupal 5.0 was released last week. What’s new since Drupal 4.7, its last major revision?

• There’s a web-based installer! (It’s not as nice as the Wordpress installer, but it’s easier than Drupal 4.7’s.)
• The administration panel/ tools is totally reworked since Drupal 4.7. In a good way.
• The new core theme lets you change color stuff dynamically with CSS
• more!

If you want to check out some sites that use Drupal, the video below shows some famous ones, like MTV UK, This Week in Technology, and SpreadFirefox.com.

While it’s easy to find out that software like Drupal is being used when it’s running a famous public website, it’s a little harder to know when it’s being used internally, in corporate, community, and organizational intranets. As it turns out, Yahoo! uses Drupal internally, and outlined the process. Based on this awesome Drupal case study from IBM, one can only assume they use it for collaboration stuff as well.

Related links:

• Drupal project lead Dries Buytaert’s personal blog (powered by Drupal, duh)
• Drupal superstars Lullabot
• The Digg.com Drupal 5.0 announcement thread. (for the patient and thick-skinned)

There’s currently some discussion in the Ubuntu community about how much proprietary stuff to include in Ubuntu by default (different from letting you grab stuff from the vendor on your own after the install). This is almost always about graphics drivers.

Community member Ante Karamatić had some interesting thoughts on the issue, and then made some points about the state of open source Linux gui bling, too:

Proprietary drivers in Ubuntu by default? Don’t. Just don’t do that. I don’t want them. If someone wants them (or must use them); great, make it as an installer option. ‘Yes, I want fancy graphics, even if nobody could help me solve tons of bugs and even if that would break suspend and hibernate and even if that would maybe mean braking GPL‘ would be an OK option in installer

OTOH, both compiz and beryl have serious issues and they should stop working on creating newer, even more useless plug-ins and start fixing some usability bugs; ‘java + beryl sometimes doesn’t work‘, ‘beryl crashes all the time‘, ‘don’t destroy my workspaces‘, ‘F9 is fetch all in evolution; now it doesn’t work‘, ‘what’s with the flickering in xmoto while running beryl and apt-get update‘, etc, etc…