Linux off the Desktop

Linux, and open source projects in general, grow in very interesting ways. Because the growth of open source projects cannot be planned. During the Google IO conference, one of my favorite talks was Chris DiBona's Open Source is Magic talk. One of the things explained in that talk was how Open Source software is not planned by a group of executives wearing suits; in fact, it is not planed at all. Most open source software originates with one developer saying "Oh, this would be really cool!", and then implementing the skeleton of that project. Then, Linus's Law kicks in. "Many eyeballs make all bugs shallow." Some developers may be added, and hopefully it is released under one of the licenses that 99.9% of all open source projects use. Although its unpredictability is one of its greatest strengths, it is hard for "industry analysts" to sit down and say that 'Linux is going to go here in five years." Five years ago, analysts had no idea of an eeePC. Of course, this leads to Steve Ballmer saying things like "Linux is a Cancer" on Intellectual Property.

Due to the unpredictability outside of Linux's kernel (which is mostly controlled by Linus and a small group of elite developers) and the current state of the computer market, Linux has grown in interesting ways. Because of its price, it has become an attractive alternative to Windows on low end PCs, because of two reasons: One, these PCs cannot handle Vista's 16GB monstrous installation, let alone its memory requirements, and two, Windows is expensive; even for OEMs it costs about twenty dollars. And in these low-price PCs, every little bit counts.

One of the main attractions of Linux's, and all free licensing, is that there is no implied support. As Chris DiBona said, if you charge any amount of money for your software, you are implying that you are going to fully support it, and you will get emails for help and feature requests. Commercial support for Linux is available, but the community support is just as good, if not better. The community built Linux from the ground up (nearly, see Minix), therefore it is logical that they are the ones that know how to use it the best.

Regardless of the support issues of Linux, it is interesting to see how both Linux and Mac OS X are cornering Windows in the software market; Linux is working its way up from the low end of the scale, with the help of Asus and the likes of the eeePC, and Mac OS X is swiping the "cream of the crop" high end of the market. With the high end users who are likely to pay a lot gone to the Mac, and the plentiful low-cost users switching to a free OS instead of an expensive and draconian rights managed one, Microsoft has no where left to run than be caught in the middle of Apple and Linux. Although Linux is by nature unpredictable, the unpredictability culminating recently may change the scope of the computer industry in the next five years. We just need to wait and see how.

An open world: Spread Virally

I'm here at the Google IO conference, and have just listened to the open social section of the first keynote. One of the interesting things that I found about Open Social is that once a company has deployed their app on a social network, the app is going to spread with about the rate of a virus. Applications on a social network that are picked up by a lot of individual users off of an enormous select applications screen are no good; a social network applications need to be adopted by one's friends. Of course, app developers are not going to hope that friends either hear about their app by word of mouth or another way, apps on a social network are able to send notifications and "invitations" to join the app and share things with your friends. Once a friend sends a notification to another friend, they can either choose to accept it and move on without using the application, or use the application and "pass it on", or send similar notifications to their friends. This provides the "web" diagram commonly linked to social networking. And this spread model is about the same as a virus.

For example, if you assume that each user sends notifications to all of his or her friends, but only three friends really adopt this new app. (Yeah, small number.)if each of those three friends has three more friends that adopt it, there are fourteen people using the app so far. And the number only gets larger. One more iteration and you have fourty-one users, and one more and you have 122. This is the viral spread of social apps; it forms an exponential curve. And, of course, the numbers only get larger. Social apps are not just each person finding and discovering on their own; they are people finding and discovering, and then passing it on. The heavy integration provided by APIs such as OpenSocial are just vessels to get people to let the apps access a contacts list when they send out notifications, and to position them in a place where they are going to be talked about, and thus spread.

The Androids! They're compiling!

I'm here at the Google IO conference in San Fransisco, and in the morning keynote we saw a real android phone. My father thinks that it is an HTC Dream. However, the coolest thing was not the way in which the internal compass communicates with Google Street view to provide a three-hundred-sixty degree street view that depended on which direction the phone was oriented; the coolest thing is that it is relatively fast. This is compiled Java. Naturally, this also makes the footprint smaller, as all of that unnecessary stuff that makes the files human readable have been stripped. This is going to set an example for how mobile phones use Java in the future, no more of these silly slow interpreted things.

One more thing: The Android multiple home screens seem like a Frankenstienian monster of the iPhone home screen and the KDE plasma widgets. It is kind of cool how the background moves half a screen when switching home screens to give the illusion of the widgets being closer to the front. Of course, the idea of using a high res panoramic shot for the background and moving it right and left when the home screen is switched is brilliant in itself.