Tag Archive for 'gnulinux'

More Twists And Turns On the GNU/Linux Advocacy Site That’s Not

“Mr. Schmitz’ response was direct and to the point. If I can’t accommodate how he chooses to run his site then I should go elsewhere. Once again, he was getting writing from me on a voluntary basis on a website were he is currently begging for money to make ends meet. This is a Linux advocacy site. You’d think he’d be the one to accommodate an aversion to proprietary tools that aren’t in any way necessary for him to publish my writing. I guess not.”
see The Linux Works: It Seems I Won't Be Writing For Linux Advocates After All

Welcome to the club of refugees from some tyrant on an ego-trip, Caitlyn. You and others might be more comfortable at GNU/Linux Advocates.

- Robert Pogson

StatCounter Finally Admits 3% GNU/Linux in USA

While IDC had counted GNU/Linux as 3% of desktop PCs back around 2003, StatCounter today showed that level on USA daily webstats:

It took a while and the rapid change is questionable but StatCounter reached 3% today for USA GNU/Linux

I still have no idea what caused these two “jumps”. It doesn’t look like any migration I have ever seen but StatCounter swears it’s not a glitch…

It’s huge, though. Along with this substantial rise in GNU/Linux, they show a huge rise for MacOS and a drop from 82% M$ to 72% M$. If that’s real, it shows consumers want anything but M$’s “8″. If XP’s heartbeat means anything it’s that business just will not allow it to die… I would have thought folks would migrate from XP to GNU/Linux but it seems they are migrating from “7″ to GNU/Linux. Whatever works… ;-)

- Robert Pogson

USA Too

I have been noticing a huge shift in usage of GNU/Linux in Canada according to StatCounter. I notice the same thing is happening in USA:
US_Daily_2013_April-May

GNU/Linux had a huge double spike, doubling ~April 15 and again on May 18. What’s with that? It’s bigger than possible with most organizations. Could it possibly be Dell’s selling Ubuntu GNU/Linux? How could that shift display itself overnight like that?

Is this the beginning of the collapse of the house of cards?

TOS_USA_April-May_2013

It even shows up globally although not as pronounced:
GNU-Linux_Global_2013-April-May

The mystery continues.

- Robert Pogson

Fun With The Grandchild

Yesterday there was a party at my place. One of the events was displaying all kinds of family-stuff on the widescreen TV from a PC. Of course, in my home, the PC runs Debian GNU/Linux and several adults picked up a wireless keyboard and displayed stuff from YouTube and FaceBook. We drifted to various conversations and the grandchild who is not yet 4 years of age picked up the keyboard. Without hesitation, and using unfamiliar equipment, she scrolled around FaceBook and played the videos she wanted…

So much for those who claim GNU/Linux is somehow hard to use. It’s a GUI. You see something, point at it, click on it and stuff happens. Even a child understands that.

- Robert Pogson

FLOSS in Government

Adam Firestone examines some red herrings trotted out to justify pockets of inertia in the government of the United States of America when it comes to adopting GNU/Linux and FLOSS. There are still huge roll-outs of M$’s OS over whole departments when clearly GNU/Linux can easily be substituted with huge savings and improvements in reliability and performance. We’ve heard them all here before…
“Within US government programs, while the use of open source software (OSS) is not mandatory, it is both permissible and often encouraged. However, due to the Byzantine nature of the controlling laws, regulations, policies, and guidance (LRPG) as well as some popular misconceptions, architects, systems engineers, and developers often encounter reactions ranging from unfamiliarity to resistance when recommending the use of OSS. For the remainder of this article, we’ll debug five of the most widespread misconceptions. Specifically, we’ll talk about the myths that:

  • OSS isn’t widely used in government programs
  • OSS isn’t equivalent to commercial software
  • Government information assurance policies prohibit OSS
  • OSS is less secure than proprietary software
  • It’s easier to insert malicious code into OSS


see Top 5 misconceptions about open source in government | opensource.com

The other one that I have encountered in my work with schools is that GNU/Linux is unfamiliar to users so there will be retraining or serious revolt with which one has to deal. That’s nonsense. Show end users the advantages and that’s gone. Users may be reluctant to change but they are glad to change for the improvements in ease of use, performance and reliability. For example, on identical hardware, I can easily demonstrate twice the speed of opening applications/windows/processes. End users love that. Administrators love that. Bean-counters love that. I love that. The fact is that the typical user familiar with XP will be more familiar with Debian GNU/Linux running XFCE Screenshot_XFCE4or GNOME 2 desktops The content of Renewable PCs (c) by Charles E. Craig, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

The content of Renewable PCs (c) by Charles E. Craig, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

than they are the default UI of “8″. It’s a GUI, for pity’s sake. Users point and click. Children as young as 3 years of age have no problem doing that although they may want larger icons than normal (configurable…).

Owners of large systems also need to know how easy it is to manage large numbers of PCs with GNU/Linux. I can set up scripts on any client that can run a script on every client to update all the software, update a particular application or package, add or delete a particular application or package. The same applies to the kernel of the operating system or any driver. This makes it trivial to treat any number of PCs exactly as you treat any one or any group of PCs. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Another frequently mentioned FUD is that users need a particular application available only on M$’s OS. That confuses tools with tasks. They are not the same. One can PhotoShopTM an image for display with GIMP, ImageMagick, InkScape, GD, fotoxx, etc. Same for spreadsheets, word-processing, video, audio, and presentation of text, images, and video. There are thousands of good applications available in GNU/Linux and FLOSS. Android/Linux is activated 1.5 million times a day and it is a FLOSS OS.

- Robert Pogson

Is The Canadian Government Rolling Out GNU/Linux Clients?

If 83% of Canadians use the Internet then there are about 24million users. According to StatCounter, there has been a doubling and a redoubling of GNU/Linux users in Canada in the last couple of months:
Fourfold_increase_Canada_2013

The sudden increase by 2%, ~480K users, can only be a whole province’s schools or the Government of Canada. Nothing else is large enough for the sudden change. Even Dell could not do that pushing GNU/Linux at the retail level. The Government of Canada has been considering use of GNU/Linux for more than a decade but certainly not globally. They even considered dual-booting rather than one OS or the other per user. In 2011, Transport Canada documented how severely they were locked in to that other OS. There’s no way they suddenly switched. Recently the government rewarded a teacher who developed a GNU/Linux laboratory. They may have read about GNU/Linux and studied it but they don’t seem to have any motivation to switch despite having an estimate of break-even of 18 months for migration.

The only conclusions I can make are that this phenomenon is either some glitch in StatCounter’s collection method or StatCounter’s bias is showing some smaller rollout as being much larger than suggested by their numbers. Perhaps StatCounter realized they were undercounting GNU/Linux and changed their methodology. There’s nothing on their webpage explaining this phenomenon. I have sent them an inquiry.
UPDATE I received a response to an inquiry to StatCounter on this phenomenon:
“Hi Robert,

Thanks for your email.

Nothing has changed in our methodology that would explain these variations. As far as we can see, this is a genuine trend, and have no reason to suspect any error at the moment. We will of course keep an eye on it.

Niall Heaney

StatCounter Global Stats”

We live in a Brave New World apparently where trends develop in a week rather than a year. It must be a very large organization to make such a rapid change or a “popular uprising”… ;-) I have long predicted a gradual or rapid collapse of Wintel. I never would have predicted a doubling and redoubling of GNU/Linux share in a few weeks. I still have no idea why “7″ and “XP” danced the way they did. Did some large organization revert to XP + GNU/Linux? That makes sense but there is not even a whisper of that on the web. Could all of the college students in Canada have returned home with a zeal for FLOSS???

- Robert Pogson

If You Can’t Persuade City-Hall To Use FLOSS, Get Elected

"We suspect that open source is practically non-existent", explains Fabio Leli, one of the activists for the Five Star Movement in the city. "This is absolutely unacceptable, for there are municipalities much smaller than ours, that are reporting significant savings by using open source."
see Five Star Movement urges Italian city of Bari to move to open source.

These guys are serious. In four years they went form nothing to 27% of the vote. The folks who resist moving to FLOSS risk losing election. The prime motivator seems to be wasting taxpayers’ money. Other cities are saving a lot by using FLOSS and the Five * movement wants Bari to do the same.

- Robert Pogson

City of Munich – IT Capital of Germany

Munich claims to be the IT capital of Germany. Is it a case of chicken versus egg? Did Munich’s migration to GNU/Linux stimulate local IT businesses or did local businesses empower Munich to migrate? Rather than worry about such things, both Munich and its IT system roll on.

see City of Munich – Munich new video for start-up scene

- Robert Pogson

The Place of FLOSS in End-User Computing

  • Smartphones
  • Tablets
  • Legacy PCs – Dell sells a raft of legacy PCs with GNU/Linux to businesses right here in Canada but not a single one for consumers… HP will sell to consumers as well, but you have to dig a bit. The default page lists none. It shows “Windows 8 or other operating systems available”. Searching finds Ubuntu GNU/Linux however. The consumer has to want GNU/Linux before that happens… That’s not really offering to sell GNU/Linux. That’s reluctantly agreeing to sell GNU/Linux to persistent consumers who mostly do not even know what an operating system is.

So, where OEMs and retailers offer to sell FLOSS systems, those systems clog the channels with high volumes and where OEMs and retailers pay homage to M$, FLOSS systems languish with small shares. What’s wrong with this picture? It’s not a free market for legacy PCs. It’s long past the time when governments should have slapped this organized criminal behaviour to exclude competition from the market. There is no shortage of software that consumers want. There is no shortage of viable operating systems. OEMs could put Android/Linux or any other distro on PCs and they would sell like hotcakes. Meanwhile, OEMs and retailers are faced with huge stocks of systems with that other OS not selling. It’s clearly in the best interest of comsumers, retailers and OEMs to sell GNU/Linux. Why don’t they get on with running their businesses instead of M$’s?

- Robert Pogson

Croatia On The Path To Freedom

“President Josipović also expressed his "complete support" for the government plans to implement open source and open standards in the public sector’s IT.”
see Croatia's President praises creative spirit of open source community

Croatia is a small energetic country with a bright future if they keep making such good decisions.

How refreshing when the leader of a country actually leads its people towards software freedom.

Free Software comes with a licence that permits the recipient to run the software without restrictions, to examine the software, to modify the software and to redistribute the software modified or not under these terms. It’s a beautiful system and the right way to do IT for governments, organizations large or small and for individuals. To try out Free Software I suggest trying Debian GNU/Linux one of the largest and longest existing distributions of Free Software.

- Robert Pogson

A Decade Of Service At Groklaw. Thank you, PJ

“FUD withers in sunlight. It only works when people lack accurate information.”
see Groklaw – Happy 10th Anniversary, Dear Groklaw! Happy 10th Anniversary to Us! ~pj

How much FUD GROKLAW deflated:

  • GPL is evil/unconstitutional,
  • Linux was copied from UNIX operating systems,
  • The world owes SCOG, M$, and lots of other parasites per user/user/machine, etc., and
  • Software Patents are good for us…

I must say I felt terribly bad when SCO claimed Linux was theirs to tax. I didn’t fully understand the world of FLOSS in those days. PJ educated all of us with thorough research and detailed legal investigations. Fortunately for the world, the courts finally saw through the smoke and mirrors to the truth. Too bad they still haven’t seen through M$’s smoke, but that gives us something for which to live.

Thanks, PJ. You have done a lot of good work and documented everything so that the search engines can pierce FUD in seconds. Thanks.

- Robert Pogson

Struggling IT

I was just reading an advertisement for a product which is supposed to cut the cost of IT so that more resources can be spent productively. It contained this gem:
“According to Gartner, when looking at the total lifetime cost of building or buying a new application, on average 42% of the initial cost of the application is going to be spent, year after year, to maintain that app. Application maintenance is the real problem.

Drilling into that 42% we find that it breaks down into three major buckets. The first bucket is enhancing the application. The second bucket is maintaining the application, break-and-fix, etc. And the final bucket is all the operational costs – the people who run the help desk, delivering upgrades to operating systems and storage environments, etc. These costs are real. “

That description must be describing non-free software because the reality of using FLOSS is much different:

  • The initial costs are much lower as upstream/distros have done a lot of the work of integration. A package manager (software that helps install and update all the software in the system) does much of the work and they’ve already done much of the testing.
  • There is no ongoing licensing cost so most of the work remaining is creating/using content/data, productive work.
  • Because open standards are followed, the cost of extending applications is less because the data can always be moved to another application.

Indeed, FLOSS solves most of the problems of IT and leaves the major part of the budget to creative/innovative work. Schools where I worked had almost zero budgets but with FLOSS a lot got done, limited mainly by imagination not effort.

I recommend using Debian GNU/Linux for the base of all IT. Debian has a huge repository and the best package manager around, APT. It is trivial to create a minimal installation of a computer or cluster and by importing a package-list one can install all the relevant software and nothing else in a few minutes. No requests for quotations, no budget-meetings, no delays. Just make it happen and try it out. You can always do it on existing hardware and move the application to some dedicated/specialized hardware later if you want. Everything is allowed by a FLOSS licence:

  1. You can run the software any way you want.
  2. You can examine it, the ultimate documentation.
  3. You can change it.
  4. You can distribute it or others can distribute it to you, modified or not.

That last feature of FLOSS software is absolutely wonderful. If you integrate a system with some application you can share it with others or have it shared with you at very low cost.

The major costs of using FLOSS are hardware and actual productive use not anything irrelevant/arbitrary. That puts more of your budget to productive use and gives you time to think. One school where I worked actually had a real IT budget for the first year of operation. Because we used FLOSS, twice as much stuff was able to be installed and the cost of operation was trivial. The school increased use of IT many times with no additional costs. Visitors from other schools were amazed because they were usually limited to one PC per classroom and one lab. We had in addition, multiple PCs per classroom, multiple servers, a gigabit/s network, ready access to printers, scanners, and cameras all for the same cost as the usual solution using non-free software. Those savings are real.

- Robert Pogson



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My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.

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