May 31st, 2009
Microsoft sneaks in Firefox extension via Update
The good news is that Microsoft is writing extensions for Firefox. The bad news is, the Redmond giant is slipping the extension onto systems without notifying users and making it difficult to get rid of the extension. Even worse? It’s an extension that allows Web sites to install software onto users’ PCs behind the scenes — meaning that Firefox users on Windows may not be as safe as they think.
Brian Krebs, who originally recommended the .Net Framework that sneaks the extension into Firefox writes:
Anyway, I’m sure it’s not the end of the world, but it’s probably infuriating to many readers nonetheless. Firstly — to my readers — I apologize for overlooking this…”feature” of the .NET Framework security update. Secondly — to Microsoft — this is a great example of how not to convince people to trust your security updates.
Krebs is right: It’s not the end of the world. But it seems like a violation of user trust to monkey with a third-party program — and top it off by making it difficult to remove the extension without editing the Windows Registry. By using the update mechanism to sneak software onto the system, Microsoft is telling security conscious users to be suspicious of updates and to deploy them only after they’ve been widely vetted, or choose a more trustworthy vendor.
As a Linux user, it makes little difference to me what Microsoft does via Windows Update –users on openSUSE and other Linux distros can see exactly what updates will do to their system: Down to the source code, if they choose to take the time.
But, failing a source code audit, Microsoft could at least provide a full disclosure of the packages and features modified when a user runs Windows Update. Without that, users should be wary indeed of trusting Microsoft’s updates — and missing a trust relationship for security updates, users should be wary of running Windows in the first place.
May 13th, 2009
What do you want for free? Do users have to pay up to complain?
Matt Asay excorates the whining masses that are taking Twitter to task for its ill-considered removal of the @replies feature. Asay says “pay money so that you actually have the right to voice your displeasure as a customer rather than as a user.” However, Asay misses a glaringly obvious point here — Twitter hasn’t given anybody the ability to pay up.
In general, I do agree with Asay that being a user isn’t enough to give someone the right to complain — or, at least, the right to be taken seriously. For open source projects, there needs to be some kind of consideration before taking a seat at the table — either as a contributor or customer. If you’re putting in sweat equity to a project, rather than cold hard cash, you should be taken seriously.
And, of course, money talks: Customers should expect their complaints to be heard, and acted on when possible and practical.
But the folks at Twitter are still finding their way, and the only option users have is to be loud in the hopes of being heard — or using alternate services like identi.ca which puts the power in the hands of its community directly. While Twitter is still trying to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up, its community doesn’t have the opportunity to “pay up” — either in contributions or money.
Right now, the only business that Twitter seems to be in is building out its user base: Which makes the complaints of its community quite valid indeed, whether or not they’ve sent a check. Depending on what business model Twitter ultimately chooses, just being an active user may be a valuable contribution in and of itself. (Assuming Twitter goes with some kind of advertising model.)
Asay’s suggestion that a predictable service is a premium business model leaves me a bit cold. Enterprise Linux distros have very little in common with Twitter, and the expectations for enterprise OSes are rather different than those for a microblogging service.
Right now, Twitter has something which Identi.ca doesn’t yet have: Momentum. But if the service continues to futz with the service and treating users like an afterthought, that may change.
May 7th, 2009
Using selfishness to put crowds to work for you
How do you enable “the wisdom of crowds”? Part of the power of community is that a group of people can solve problems much more easily than individuals, but only if you can provide tools that make it possible for them to do so and appeal to their own interests.
Derek Powazek has an interesting post over on A List Apart that details some of the components necessary for “a crowd to be wise.” According to Powazek, you have to have simplicity, a clean interface, aggregation, and a group of people who are thinking about their own needs:
It’s counter-intuitive, but the wisest crowds are the ones made up of individuals who are thinking about their own needs, not the needs of the group. In the stock market, the participants are all motivated to buy low and sell high. Yet the markets are usually wise about finding the value of a company. Each person is thinking about their bottom line, not the health of the company or the market, but it works.
Similarly, website creators were not consciously voting for certain sites to be highly ranked, but the collective linking decisions did produce wise results. Nowadays, link spammers do try to manipulate Google’s results, which is akin to stock manipulation. Both practices are fought by the institutions that depend on unmanipulated results.
Altruism is all well and good, but people are usually much more motivated by their own interests than the interests of others. This is one reason why open source code is usually so much better than the documentation that accompanies it (unless someone is paid to produce the docs): People contribute code because they want to use the code. People write open source documentation, typically, for altruistic purposes. Which is why many documentation projects flounder — the documentation does the writer little to no good, as they’re unlikely to read it again.
Code, however, is continually useful, because it’s often produced for “selfish” purposes.
If you’re wondering how to drive participation in a project: Whether it’s an open source project, a collaborative Web site, or some other endeavor don’t think about what’s in it for you: Think about what’s in it for them. When you can find a way to let the crowd scratch their own itches, and provide the necessary tools to do so, you’re on the road to success.
April 30th, 2009
Miro puts code up for adoption
I’ve heard of “orphaned” code, but this is a new one. The Miro project is trying a new approach to funding: asking enthusiasts to “adopt” lines of code.
From the letter to adopters on the site:
We’re a small non-profit in a sea of big budget, for-profit competitors, and the recent stock market crash has severely hurt the foundations that fund the bulk of our work. But we want to take this crisis and use it as an opportunity to flip our funding model on its head. If enough of our users adopt lines of Miro code, we can create an organization that is funded from the bottom-up and not dependent on the top-down.
We aren’t here to make money, we’re here for a mission: to distribute wonderful video around the world in a system that’s more open and decentralized than ever before. To do that, we need you to help us care for a little tiny piece of Miro.
If you’re not familiar with Miro, it’s “open Internet TV,” a player that can handle nearly any video file and it boasts more than 6,000 free Internet TV shows and podcasts. Miro handles Quicktime, AVI, MPEG, WMV and other formats with ease.
For a mere $4 per month, you can “adopt a line of source code,” to “keep Miro alive and growing.” That’s a steal for all the Internet video junkies who depend on Miro for their content fix.
Adopters will not only receive the warm fuzzy feeling of supporting their own bundle of code, they’ll get a customized page and widgets to display the code and a “photo” of your new little buddy. You have to hand it to the Miro folks. It’s a novel approach, and just might work.
April 29th, 2009
Oprah comes, Oprah goes: Who cares?
As a tool, Twitter has its advantages and disadvantages, but does it really matter if Oprah Winfrey decides to keep up with her account or not? Apparently the Silicon Alley Insider finds it fascinating, even tracking the number of people following her and the rate of new followers compared to other popular folks on Twitter.
I don’t pay a lot of attention to entertainment news, but since Winfrey’s activity on Twitter is making the news I thought it’d be good to point out that this is a pretty poor metric for the success or failure of an online community. Whether Winfrey (or a ghost twitterer) is hitting Twitter to tell us all about her shopping sprees or lunches with other celebrities.
Likewise, how many followers a single person can attract is a pretty lousy metric for community health. Having Oprah on Twitter may have driven a lot of people to the service initially, but it’s whether they talk to one another — not Oprah — that matters.
April 24th, 2009
The argument for free fonts
Bring up free fonts around typeface designers, and you’ll probably get an earful about the relative quality of free and open source designs against the professionally designed fonts. Mark Pilgrim, over on Dive into Mark gives an earful back.
The context here is a discussion of using dynamic Web fonts (a typeface, to be more accurate) in site design, where the publishers are insisting that applications (like the Web browser you’re using right now) be upgraded to allow for a permission table that can allow (or deny) you to use a specific font.
Back to the quality issue. When you bring up open source fonts, professional designers will tell you how horrible they are, how they’re not well-designed, they lack full support for all characters, etc. Much of this, unfortunately, is true. Pilgrim concedes the quality issue, but points out the major disadvantage to professionally designed (and proprietary) fonts — because of licensing, we can’t use them.
Dynamic web fonts are coming. Actually they’re already here, but most of Our People haven’t noticed yet. But they will, and that’s going to be a huge boon to somebody. I see you’ve decided that it won’t be you. Well, have fun shuffling your little bits of metal around. The rest of us will be over here, using the only fonts we’re allowed to use: Everything But Yours.
Pilgrim gets a wee bit worked up about this, but he’s right: Proprietary fonts are a problem for designers as well as free software projects.
The openSUSE community has run into this on several fronts. We used to ship Agfa fonts with openSUSE, but they had a restrictive license and had to go out the door when we reworked our distribution license. Instead, we’re using the Liberation fonts now for openSUSE.
Our “official” font for marketing materials and the like is Cholla, but that’s a proprietary font as well — meaning that if we want the community to be able to create artwork to promote the project, they have to have a copy of Cholla or they won’t be able to replicate the “official” look and feel. (Which is why Jakub Steiner started the Fifth Leg font, which is meant to be a drop-in replacement at some point for Cholla.)
It’s a roadblock, but one the community will eventually work around. As Pilgrim says, “Well, have fun shuffling your little bits of metal around. The rest of us will be over here, using the only fonts we’re allowed to use: Everything But Yours.”
April 20th, 2009
What does Oracle mean for Sun's open source efforts?
So much for a big blue Sun. Instead, the company is being gobbled up Oracle for about $7.4 billion. Does this mean that Oracle will become “the biggest contributor to open source,” or a gaping hole in the FOSS ecosystem?
Sun often likes to brag that it’s the largest contributor to open source — and not without some justification. The company does participate in a lot of projects, and with OpenOffice.org, MySQL, and Java, controls some pretty hefty pieces of the open source ecosystem.
Ellison has already announced Oracle’s intention to be “the only company that can engineer an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves.” But the statement doesn’t say diddly about Oracle’s intentions towards Sun’s open source holdings. It also mentions Solaris, but doesn’t say anything about OpenSolaris. It’s certainly understandable that MySQL users would be nervous about the news.
When IBM was courting Sun, there was a reasonable amount of optimism that it would be a good steward of Sun’s open source efforts. Oracle seems like more of an unknown quantity. Oracle isn’t hostile towards open source, but Oracle’s participation in FOSS is very strategic (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and narrowly focused to Oracle’s interests, and certainly much quieter than IBM’s. Oracle’s statement has a one-sentence statement regarding its commitment to Linux, and nothing regarding the future of Oracle’s open source projects, but nothing regarding its plans for pursuing (or not) open source strategies around Sun’s existing projects.
Sun has been trying to build community around its various initiatives, but Oracle doesn’t have a history here at all. Will it simply pick up where Sun left off? If Oracle’s history is any indication, it’s not big on preserving the culture of companies that it’s snarfed up. Will Sun be any different?
For the near future, at least, I expect things to remain status quo. In the long term, though, it will be interesting to see if Oracle takes over community building where Sun leaves off, or if Oracle allows the communities to wither. While Oracle hasn’t snuffed BerkeleyDB as a FOSS project, for example, it hasn’t been nearly as visible as it was when Sleepycat was pushing BerkeleyDB.
From a business standpoint, I think IBM will regret letting Sun slip through its fingers. From an open source standpoint, the community may regret IBM’s letting Sun slip through its fingers.
April 18th, 2009
Prioritizing bugs to boost Linux adoption
What are the problems that need to be solved to boost Linux adoption? And in what order? If we get the order right, we can make more users happier faster, says Scott Ritchie.
Ritchie starts by looking at bugs in Wine. After 16 years in development (give or take), Wine is pretty good, but it still can’t run all Windows applications perfectly. It runs some very well, and some not at all. But it’s not yet where users can simply run their Windows apps on Linux.
Ritchie looks at the bugs that Wine needs to solve before being able to run all Windows applications, and estimates about 10,000 bugs before it will be complete. That’s a lot of bugs, but not all bugs are equal. Some fixes will make more users happy than others:
Now let’s define an application as some subset of these bugs. A working application is one that has all its bugs solved. We can also give each bug a different relative probability of affecting an application - maybe bug x is 10 times more likely to affect an application than bug y.
A user is then defined as a set of applications he needs. A “happy user” is one who has all his applications working. Just like with the applications, we can assign relative probabilities to reflect the real world - World of Warcraft is 60 times more likely than CuteCatExploderPro.
After doing some thinking along those lines, and some scripting to model different scenarios, Ritchie comes to the conclusion: “The strategy we use - the order we tackle various bugs - really does matter. Every strategy gets to the perfect 100% end after solving all the bugs, but some get you 10 times as many happy users when you’re only half done. In practice, having far more users likely translates into extra developers and a much faster rate of development.”
The same thing is true of Linux: If you look at some of the barriers of entry for potential users, some are much higher than others. Driver support affects more users than other bugs or potential improvements. Now the question is, which barriers to knock down to make the most users happiest the fastest?
April 16th, 2009
Yet another "Mac vs. PC" article that misses the point
BusinessWeek has yet another article on the relative costs of Macs vs. PCs, and author Arik Hesseldahl comes down on the Mac side:
PC makers in the Windows camp have done everything possible to make their products progressively worse by cutting corners to save pennies per unit and boost sales volume. There’s good reason Apple is seeing healthy profits while grabbing market share. It refuses to budge on quality and so charges a higher price.
Actually, Apple is losing market share (slightly). According to Gartner, anyway, Apple had negative growth in the first quarter and dropped very slightly (0.1%) in market share.
Apple edges out a lot of users with their limited, and yes overpriced, selection. When I look at Apple’s offerings, I don’t see anything that fits my needs. I want a basic machine that I can stuff a lot of memory and disk in. Note that I said “that I can…” — not an Apple reseller.
The only offering Apple gives users that really fits the bill for my use case is a Xeon-based monster that starts at $2,500. The thing is, I don’t want or need a Xeon. Well, OK, I kind of want one, but I don’t need one. Apps aren’t bottlenecked at the CPU, in most cases. The extra CPU isn’t what I want, it’s RAM, and gobs of it. And disk space for VMs and such. A Core 2 Duo would do just fine.
Lucky for me, I can get what I want with generic PC hardware and Linux. With Apple, you’re constrained to its 16 offerings and some overpriced customizations.
That’s just one example, of course, but Apple’s offerings are generally high-priced for the hardware offered and make no concessions for users who don’t fit their use cases.The point that Hesseldahl and others miss is that the PC market offers way more choice than Apple, even if some of those choices are bargain basement hardware.
Lauren may be a Microsoft shill, but it doesn’t mean that Macs are reasonably priced or vastly better than other systems by any stretch of the imagination.
April 15th, 2009
Google releases source for Google Update
Word came down from the Google-plex last Friday that the company has decided to release the source code for Google Update. Codenamed Omaha, Update is a software installer that automatically updates Google Earth, Chrome, and other Google-produced apps designed to run on Windows. The development team says they decided to release Omaha under the Apache 2.0 license in the interest of true transparency and because they “know that keeping software up to date is hard.”
Hard is relative, of course. Updating software is a hard problem, but it’s been more or less solved for years on Linux. The software that comes from your vendor or project repositories can be updated without headaches using tools like Zypper, Apt, or Yum without any real fuss.
Granted, a big part of this is due to open source: openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, and the rest of the distros can provide a central repository for the software that makes up the distribution because it is open source. Windows users have to get their software from too many sources to make it viable for a centralized updater.
But, I digress. It is cool to see Google releasing this as open source for other vendors and projects that might benefit from it.
It’s important to note that the code is for Google Update, not Google Updater, which is part of Pack. Apparently Google is aware the names are causing a bit of confusion and they’re working on clarifying the issue. “One idea would be for Google to provide a list of what Google client software gets updates using Google Update,” writes Google software engineer Sorin Jianu.
Opening Omaha’s code benefits developers who are trying to create their own auto-updaters, and also draws on the collective wisdom of the open source community to drive further development. As blogger Alex Russell points out, it may have at least one other consequence. “It’s huge for the Omaha team to be out in the open, particularly given how many inaccurate articles have been penned about the update system. Now you, dear user and/or journalist, can know exactly what the update system is doing all the time. It’s all right there in the code.”
If you want to dig in to Omaha’s source code and help build it, you’ll find detailed instructions in the Developer Startup Guide. If you just want to poke around a bit without downloading anything, you can check it out right online.
Or, you know, you could run one of the many flavors of Linux and enjoy really robust package updates for almost all your apps.
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a longtime FOSS advocate, and currently works for Novell as the community manager for openSUSE. Prior to joining Novell, Brockmeier worked as a technology journalist covering the open source beat for a number of publications, including Linux Magazine, Linux Weekly News, Linux.com, UnixReview.com, IBM developerWorks, and many others. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations. Follow Zonker on Twitter.
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