Why Wayland is good for the future of Ubuntu, Canonical, etc.

History
 
The recent announce at UDS about the fact that the venerable X server & protocols will not be the default choice for Unity and as a consequence Ubuntu was a shock for some, it is clearly a relief for me.

In my precedent post about Unity, (before the UDS/Wayland announcement) I said "In this context, Ubuntu/Canonical is more conservative than Apple and Google that decided to dump X altogether. I'm not sure the X environment is fitted for next millennium challenges : once again, time will tell."

Obviously, the X server and protocol are great tools, very mature and with numerous capabilities. For a long time, evolution was slow, some would say "frozen" but then X.org did a great job and things started to evolve again.

However, being in the field, deploying X-based thin-clients since 2003 and designing larger scale and user friendly open source thin client solution (LTSP-Cluster) made me wonder if this was a protocol fitted for the future.

Why not X ?
Without being a X expert, some of the issues that were critical in the (announced) move from X server to Wayland

Hardware support : I strongly recommend to run Linux only on hardware with a well supported video driver : without a well supported driver, the experience can be daunting, especially on a thin-client. X was supposed to be hardware independent, lightweight and provide great performance.

However these fights had been lost long ago : I've learned the hard way that not all X drivers are equals : open-source or not, how many XV channels are supported, 3D (what version exactly, etc.). In fact, selecting good quality desktop or thin-client hardware is a service we sold to our customers !

Size matters : a default X.org server, on my desktop where I wrote this blog is 64Mb (without cache), 180Mb (with cache) on a Ubuntu 10.10, 64 bit with regular 3D effects. Well, on a phone with 256Mb or RAM or on an ARM based thin client with 64Mb, this is not good. I can imagine it also has an impact on battery life on the mobile devices.

A toolbox instead of a simple tool : Without being "bloated", it is certain that X has evolved, along the year, to support a huge number of hardware, protocols and has a long history and has a load of quirks and "this is not a bug, it is a feature" type of functionality.

Crispiness : X is not very crisp. Without being a usability expert, I can guarantee that, in my experience on iPad, Mac, Android device, those devices are much more responsive graphically than your average Linux desktop. Why ? I'm no X expert but I will propose the hypothesis that this is because of the legacy of the project.

3D : Without discussing the time it took to obtain 3D support at the X level, remember the Compiz/Beryl/Looking Glass and the time it took for them to mature while most of the X user where despising the efforts ? How well is 3D integrated into your desktop environment ?

Why Wayland ?

Most of the reasons don't have anything to do with Wayland and are consequences of the present IT competitive environment, the current state of X as well as business needs.  In this context, we will see that Wayland happened to be exactly what was needed : instead of starting from scratch a start-up project, hosted by freedesktop.org, an existing proof of concept and prototype, an already existing but small community with the goal to improve user experience.

My first reason is a practical one : I think that in order to make X evolves to a state suited for Mobile Internet Devices (MID) it request a deep technical knowledge of X as well as a long time to really convince all the X shareholders to agree to a change. Will the market wait for this change : I'm sure it will not ! Will everyone agree to the need to change : not certain either. Can a company accept this level of risk for what is their future ? According to Wikipedia, X11 dates back to 1984. Is it possible and wise to compete in this space with a technology that is 26 years old : I really don't think so (I'm saying this with a profound respect to everybody that contributed to the X11 project : the fact that it was great for 20+ years, in IT, is clearly a tribute to the design and the project itself).

Another way to look at this is the "disruptive innovation" or "disruptive technology" model. Mobile Internet Devices are changing the IT world ... big time. Major players are on the verge of becoming irrelevant in a new market that is growing faster than any other market in IT. Think about the position of RIM, Blackberry, PalmOS, Microsoft, etc. in this market space ? Others are sizing (creating?) the opportunity and went from losers/non-existent to key players (Apple with the iPod, iPhone, iPad and, of course, Google with Android). In order to compete in this space, legacy has to be left behind : your average MID does not share a lot in common with your desktop : UI of every single application has to be re-designed in order to take into account : screen size, touch screen, multi-touch, no mouse/keyboard, battery consumption, etc.

Wayland goals are the following (according to Wikipedia) "every frame is perfect, by which I mean that applications will be able to control the rendering enough that we'll never see tearing, lag, redrawing or flicker".

Well, in term of goal, it really puts the user in the center of things : a display manager that provide a great user experience. Ubuntu is popular on the desktop because it really put efforts into design and decided to place the user in the center of things.

Conclusion

Well, it is always interesting when a decision you were expecting happens. In a sense, I'm pleased and excited because it is the only way to compete and provide an open-source solution in the MID market and, why not, somehow piggybacking on the desktop market.

While Android could have been a possible choice, choosing Android will have constraint Ubuntu/Canonical to ... follow innovation, not to drive innovation. Also, Android has some issue, especially if you value the open-source development model where all the doors are open for the community to join and participate.


All in all, my only reserve is with the timing : if Wayland is ready in one year from now, it means a 2-4 years of delay compared to, let's say, Google and Android. More than this with Apple. In this context, the question is : Is it too late ?

Evolution and revolution are and will be needed in order for Open Source to continue to be relevant. This is particularly true in a disruptive market like the MID market. The announce was certainly a great way to launch one. History will tell if will succeed : I really hope it will and I really encourage the Open Source community to see the big picture out there, regroup and, ultimately, to contribute as much as possible to Wayland & Unity in order to make it a first class open source citizen able to run on any MID device and on any desktop.

Why Unity is good for the future of Ubuntu, Gnome, Canonical, etc.

Desktop and windows manager

A few month ago I already blogged about "the end of the (Linux) desktop as we know it." I will not blatantly repost this entry but draw some conclusions linked to the recent adoption of Unity for the default Ubuntu desktop.

My conclusion was the following : "At a certain level, one can say that the battle is already lost : the current desktop environments can not really fight this war as they don't own the key technology : the browser. As a consequence, the risk, for them (Gnome, KDE, etc.) is to be a tool that will launch a browser. A (relatively) simple tool that can be easily changed with almost no user impact..."

The recent announcement at UDS confirm that this road is the one chosen by Ubuntu. Now the question is why and what benefits for the key players here : Canonical, Ubuntu, Gnome and, of course, the users.

Mobile Internet Devices (MID) = application delivery

The new hardware platforms (most of them ARM based, touch-screen based, with small screen and no keyboards) rely extensively on the cloud/web based application and deploy specific small size applications on every connected MID.

The "desktop" on those platforms is very different from the one on your regular  "old-school" computer : it consists mainly of giant dock with widgets and your most used apps and a task-bar that informs you about communications (tweet, email, voice mail, etc.) and the MID status (wifi, phone, battery, etc.).

Most of the regular desktop applications are barely usable on such a device : do you think that Open Office user experience will be great on a 640x480 screen with no keyboard ? All those applications are now somehow "legacy" and given the specific user interaction with the MID and the MID capabilities (touch screen, multi-touch, accelerometer, low computing power, etc.) can not be used, with a great user experience, on those devices. Even the most "cross-platform" software, the browser, is specific to the MID device and every major player rolled out a specific version (lighter, snappier, etc.) for those platform.

So can we use the legacy application, yes. Will they succeed "as is" on those MID : I don't think so.

Can a MID platform succeed on the desktop ?

Well, this is the interesting question. Ubuntu/Canonical decided to bet on it. In fact, instead of synchronizing your desktop to your MID, why not consider your desktop as ... a very large MID ?

Apple did it the other way around, Microsoft as well bu they both come from the old desktop world. Google did it from Android for MID to a hypothetical GoogleOS that will certainly be very similar to your Android experience.

Ubuntu/Canonical is betting on the fact that users will follow them from the MID market to the desktop market. This is an interesting challenge and a really disruptive choice : let's break compatibility with the past and embrace this new way of delivering applications.

Will it succeed : only time, users and the market can tell ;-)

Impact on key players : gnome, Ubuntu/Debian, Canonical, users

Well, as I announced it in my precedent post, the legacy of the desktop environment out there is too cumbersome to carry on this new trendy market. Nokia (QT, Symbian, Meego) , Google (Android), Apple and Canonical came to the same conclusion : they can not build on top of those legacy windows environment (most of the time : because they have to serve a community of developers and users that care only about the "old" desktop model) : they had to start from scratch for the user interface. However, they kept some very useful and precious components like the kernel, basic OS, etc..

In this context, Ubuntu/Canonical is more conservative than Apple and Google that decided to dump X altogether. I'm not sure the X environment is fitted for next millennium challenges : once again, time will tell.

Gnome : I think this is a great news. Leveraging the tools, library and previous applications, a new "shell" can be developed that will be perfectly suited for MID. This, I can imagine that innovation can flow more freely from Desktop to MID and vice versa. Will Gnome developers embrace this change ? Will it provoke a community meltdown ? This is more an ego risk than a technological or business one. FLOSS is famous for its ego war and this may be the greatest risk for this key-player.

Ubuntu/Debian : Well, this really open another market for this distribution. A strong differentiator compared to RedHat, Novell. Competition on this market is called Android. Not an easy one to take on...

Canonical : As far as I know, the OEM division will have another great product to sell ! Just look at sales figures from Apple and Android device. This look very interesting to me. As the third or fourth player (Apple, RIM, Google, ...), becoming leader in this market will be a real challenge. Two very closed platform, two very open platforms. A huge and very fast growing market.

Users : Choice is always beneficial to some degree. As the default desktop environment will change, we will see the adoption rate but I expect it to be quite large in the Ubuntu community. This is a well known tactics (anyone remember Microsoft embedding IE into the desktop ?) that has worked well in the past. Also, it will help "convergence", namely the unification of your desktop and MID environment ... through the cloud services that will be offered on this platform (Music, More content, Storage, Contact, Preferences, ...).

Conclusion

All in all, I think this is great news for the future of Linux and all the involved party (Gnome, Ubuntu/Debian, Canonical and Mr. User). My only concerns are linked to some possible ego-war into the Gnome community and the fact that this will "only" be a tertiary platform in term of applications and content delivery : RIM seems in trouble, Apple the clear gorilla and Android the strong challenger. Will the great marketing and community/viral effect of Ubuntu be able to modify the race results ?

How to choose the right cloud for your needs.

The cloud : Basic definition

The cloud is very trendy these days. It can be seen as a marketing tool to somehow revamp the Software as a service industry. This of course also evolves from simple "SaAS" to different levels of service, namely infrastructure as a service (think amazon EC2, etc.) , platforms as a service (think Google app engine, etc.) and of course the good old "Software as a service" (think SugarCRM, etc.).

Given the broad definition of the cloud, almost any IT company can say "this is what we've been doing since 200_" (insert your favourite digit here!)

When trying to sell these funny things, vendors encounter a major difficulty : many corporations/organizations are used to the so called "firewall principle" and don't trust anything outside their firewall for so-called critical applications and also for serious red-tapping (our internal policy prevents us from ..., we can not do this because of ..., etc.).

One can argue that security and IT management is way better for major cloud providers (Amazon, Google, etc.) than it is for most of us so-called "small scale" organizations ( compared to 1 Million+ servers , many organizations are "small scale" according to this definition!). Even if this is true from a technical and processing aspect , this does nothing to ease the pain and allow the cloud to be used by these organizations.

Ladies and Gentlemen : Here comes the private cloud !

In the past , vendors adapted their marketing and sales pitch by creating a new marketing term : the so called "private cloud" that refers to the re-branded "public cloud" offered by major hosting providers (Rackspace, etc.), web 2.0+ major actors (Amazon, Google).

In a way, a private cloud is the answer for vendors to somehow respect the "behind the firewall rules". It provides access to a cloud platform inside your organization. Also, it implicitly solves the "privacy/security" issue with a saying that says it all : private is private after all !

I believe this is highly misleading because it implies that everything on the public cloud is ... public. This is clearly not the case. Even if any given "public" cloud provider is so-called "multi-tenant" (meaning that different customers can share for a period of time the same hardware), if you use secure protocols and encryption, you can be pretty certain that everything you send is private and only seen by you . The only risk added being the one of the virtualization layer itself , are all virtual machines really isolated when sharing the same hardware ?

Most of the time, a choice has already been made : most of us have already been using virtualized servers in a production environment in the past .

For the "very secure" few that don't allow virtualization for security reasons , this is not the subject of this post ;-) therefore, you have two choices : Change your policy or stay away from virtualization and cloud technology...

My proposal is to drop the "public/private" cloud definition in favor of a more precise definition in order to define where the cloud is located in terms of network topology, whether the cloud is shared or dedicated and who managed the cloud (you or a cloud provider).

In front of your firewall or not ?
More precise classification means, is the cloud behind your firewall or in front of your firewall ?

• An internal cloud is behind your firewall
• An external cloud is "in front" of your firewall, on the Internet

Managed by yourself or shared ?

If you manage your cloud, lets call this a self-managed cloud.

If you outsource the management of your cloud, lets call this an outsourced cloud.

Is it dedicated or shared ?

A dedicated cloud is used only by you. You are the sole user of the resources (servers, network equipment, storage, etc.) that provides the cloud services.

A shared cloud is multi-tenant : several users share resources (CPU, RAM, storage space, etc...).
Often times , dedicated means more expensive : as the sole user of the infrastructure provided by the cloud, you have to assume all the costs.

However, given the "pay as you go" principle of the external shared clouds, it can be less expensive to run your own cloud for the regular load of your organization and to use the public cloud only for specific workloads/peaks.

3 major types of clouds : 
 
Internal dedicated cloud : self managed or outsourced ?

This is the closest to virtualization as we know it. Most of the time , you own the data, the servers and need to manage everything : the hardware, cloud software and the operating system. The main difference is that you use a cloud stack (open source or not...) consequently , you need to standardize your workload.

The main advantage of doing this is you benefit from an external cloud (managed or outsourced) and tap into external resources when you need it. This allows the IT department to offer a common platform to each internal customer. This is especially interesting for large organizations and can be much more economical than a public cloud.

Instead of a "pay as you go" way of billing, you can fit this type of cloud into a classic budget : capital investment for the initial deployment, fixed price for the management of the cloud. In practice, one can argue that this is not really "the cloud" as you still have to manage "scarcity" (i.e.: a fixed amount of resources) instead of ubiquity (a somehow "infinite" computing power, bandwidth and storage capacity). It is said that constraint generates innovation , therefore this type of constraint is not necessarily bad per say .

If you self-manage your cloud, you are in charge of all the stacks and regular IT processes : provisioning, capacity planning, etc. You can manage a fixed budget : a capital budget needed with a fixed operation budget (power, staff, etc.). You can manage scarcity (the actual amount of resources you have).

If you outsource the management, you are a user of your cloud and can decide to scale up based on pre-agreed fees, per server or per-storage nodes.

This model fits nicely into an existing infrastructure and acquisition process : you can really benefit from this model as you are able to leverage the somehow "standardization" of the workload management while you remain completely in sync with your organization's acquisition policy and budget.


External dedicated : self-managed or outsourced

External dedicated is an extension of the preceding category: you can use a hosting provider to own your own cloud. In this case, the cloud is clearly in front of your firewall. On the other hand , the cloud is not shared. Servers are only used by you and no one else. You can even re-sell your spare cycles ;-)
You can also self-manage or even outsource the management of the cloud.
This model requests only minor updates to your security policy. This is very similar to hosting your public services at a data centre , can become an easy sell and an easy way to start implementing a cloud strategy.

External shared and outsourced
This is the "classical cloud", the one offered by Google, Amazon, Rackspace, etc. This infrastructure management is outsourced to the cloud provider and the cloud is therefore multi-tenant : various users share various physical resources.

Conclusion
We defined different ways a cloud can be deployed into an organization and used some more precise terms to define where the cloud is located (topology), who managed it (you or somebody else) and if the cloud's resources are shared or dedicated.

These definitions clearly overlap the traditional marketing and trendy "public/private" cloud approach and this is why the public/private vocable seems inappropriate due to its lack of precision.

In terms of IT governance and acquisition processes, the internal dedicated self-managed cloud is the easiest to sell/deploy, even for a very conservative organization. Benefits from the cloud could be very important even in this context, especially if you have developers and the need for development, staging and production environment.

Of course, to be able to really tap into the ubiquity of the cloud and its potentially unlimited (but billed!) resources, one will need to extend its comfort zone and somehow connect to a shared external and outsourced cloud. This disruptive innovation is only available for organizations that have completely revamped their development process, their security policy, as well as their acquisition mechanism.

Start-ups don't have any legacy and can start right away without any capital expenditures , this said , Cloud and its operational costs is directly based on usage : this is not something every organization is ready to deal with.

Other organizations will need to compromise and can do so by using any of the mentioned cloud deployment models that provide various levels of flexibility in terms of :

• capital vs operational budget (private -> shared)
• outsourcing or not (self-managed -> outsourced)
• firewall position (internal->external)

 Of course, another important parameter is about free/open source/neo-proprietary/proprietary cloud. This is for another entry ;-)

Neo-proprietary tactic considered harmful to open source

Definitions

The Freemium model is a marketing model used by lots of service based companies. The principle is to offer a product "for free" supporting it with or without advertising and offer value-added services to "premium" customer that pay a fee. Very popular amongst startups and recent technology companies : skype, linkedin, rememberthemilk, etc.

At some point, one could even argue that the most successful open source company (RedHat) is very closed to this model : they offer a great product for free (the RedHat Linux Distribution) and monetize services of only a small percent of their users.

Fauxpensource has several definitions and even if this is not yet a widely used term. Some synonims are open-core or neo-proprietary. Neo-proprietary is the term I will use in this post as there is no common sounds or part with Open Source.

Somehow, what happens when you marry the two concepts together ? Well, that's somehow the subject of this post.


Open Source various dimensions for neo-proprietary +freemium companies 

Open-Source has several dimensions not only a economical/marketing : a healthy project has all those aspects covered/fulfilled : technical, political, philosophical, economical, social, ethical. My point is that, more and more, companies are using open source only for its economical value : as a cheap and fast way to build a community of users (free) and, more importantly, customers (paying) that allow them to replicate the business model of traditional software editor.

In some respect, the market is expecting this exact behavior : entrepreneur are now advised by the investors/VC/lawyers to make sure that everything is covered from contributor agreement to free and paid users agreement.

The (not so) hidden plan is simply to have an exit strategy based on an acquisition so that any number of closed source/traditional company can integrate/use the intellectual property (lawyer language here!).

Today, being open-source is seen as the fastest track to build a freemium (aka potential customer) and premium (aka real customer) "community" (much more sexy than customer base).

I will argue here that this is not really open source and it hurts the open source brand as a whole : those startups (and there is a lot out there!) do no take the time to develop their :

• ethics. For contributor : yeah yeah, open source is very important for us : please sign this contributor agreement that allow us to re-license all your contributions as we see fit forever, etc.
• political. Most of the time, there is no political structure, only a business structure that dictate the politic based on short term goals or based on the exit strategy (the exit strategy is not communicated to the employee or customers but all the structure is designed to maximize the value of the product)
• technical. Well, most of the time open-source is selected for technical excellence. In those companies, an open source technology is selected based on license flexibility/compatibility, not based on technical excellence.
• social. For products, the goal is to have paying users, not to build a community of like minded people. Same thing for employee, developers/contributors. The social aspect is simply a mean to maximize the profit when the company will be sold : it is a honeypot to attract paying customers.
• philosophical : well, long term goals do not match very well with VC with an agressive exit strategy.

Of course, the economical (and legal!) aspects are very well developed : this is the main (only?) concern of the shareholders (entrepreneur, management, VC, etc.) : it is the only measured indicator (burn rate, market value, conversion rate from free to premium customer, etc.).

Why is this harmful for Open Source?

Well, let's follow a customer experience in this context. He knows a bit about open-source and find the model interesting. He like the idea to have a company that can provide value with a service offering or an add-on offering.

He tried the open-source/freemium edition and later on he decid to purchase the whole package. Then the company is acquired by Orache Corp. and everything is turned upside-down : the "product" can become proprietary again, price can be doubled (or worse) or the service agreement terms completely changed.

For this customer and for the market, there is no difference between this and any proprietary software : the community is, most of the time destroyed by the acquisition, the business ecosystem as well, the long-term strategy of the project can be completely changed and nobody has a saying about this : everything has been carefully planned by the buyer.

The customer has been deceived : he trusted a brand (Open Source) but has been manipulated into something else (in this example : becoming customer of a proprietary software). There is no difference between this story and the numerous stories involving dissatisfied customers that are hostages of the numerous mergers and acquisitions that occurs in the IT industry since its inception.

In fact, the mistake made by those companies is to restrain open-source to a technical, economical and legal questions only and not to consider the complete scope of Open Source namely the ethical, political, social and question.

I learned today a the open-source think tank in Paris that 90% of companies get acquired : this is the most frequent exit strategy for most of the companies and there is nothing wrong with this. Being "Open Source" should be more than an exit strategy for a start-up and that labeling those companies/projects "Open Source" is misleading for all the open source community.
 How can we, as the Open Source community make sure that  our brand still carries feelgood and positive values ?

I think that labelling properly the "neo-proprietary" companies would be very helpful : even if they respect the open source license, they clearly don't intend to respect the spirit of open source. In order to do so, proper criteria accepted by the community have to be defined and the term has to be used extensively by the community.

FLOSS for Medium Businesses : challenges and opportunities

Context

Last Friday, I did a presentation to a group of medium businesses. The audience was about 20 IT directors of businesses between 100 and 500 employees (Medium Businesses . A first presentation was made by another presenter about Open Source in general : basic principles, licence/freedom, ecosystem,  business model. As a consequence, we could say that Free Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) was introduced before my talk.

Every organization in the room use FLOSS. 90% of them ran some kind of FLOSS and were aware of it : Asterisk, Apache, CMS, etc. 10% used some kind of appliance or third-party (SaaS) with FLOSS inside.


Initial presentation : Success stories of Open Source deployment

My presentation was articulated around different business cases / success story. In each case, the initial business goal was stated :

• divide the total cost of ownership by 5 for a desktop project we are doing in China
• step by step migration to open source starting with infrastructure/servers and moving higher in the stack, including OpenOffice and then desktop
• replace legacy POS system for a restaurant franchise : distributed linux thin clients using LTSP-Cluster
• a manufacturing company that migrate its complete IT system : Open Source ERP and Linux thin client in the plant

The reception from the audience was great and several questions/objections were mentioned. If you attended the conference, you'll noticed that the form has been modified but, hopefully, not the content !

Challenges for Open Source in the Medium Business market

• Referral cases / business cases more difficult to publicize. It is relatively easy to find information about large migration of large organization. With an efficient PR service and marketing department, they tend to "brag" about their Linux/FLOSS deployment. Mid-size company don't and it is much more difficult to find market evidence of FLOSS Migration. Previsionnist companies (Gartner, etc.) do not analyze this market often...
  
• An IT director mentioned "We have a very small IT team, it is not possible to learn new technologies". The financial crisis has stretched the existing resources quite a bit and FLOSS, as a new technology to learn, is problematic. IMHO, this is more linked to the "exit cost" of any solution than something specific to FLOSS : solution in IT don't last for ever. Who should pay for the exit cost : the initial technology or the new challenger ? I will certainly blog about this point later on but I strongly encourage IT directors to integrate the exit cost in their initial technology purchase : this is good practice and will bring agility to your organizations.
  
• Another question "How can we find expertise in FLOSS ?". As a matter of fact, the business model of the Open Source companies was not clear enough and even if the two companies that presented (including Revolution Linux) were able to offer consulting, services and third level support to these companies, they were not known beforehand. The existing suppliers do not support FLOSS : they are used to sell hardware, licences and services.

Transition from a vendor market to buyer market

I think this was the biggest objection. It can be explained this way : "While I have vendors calling me all day long and pushing me new product and services, nobody is marketing open source..."

I think this is true : established companies with sales channel already open tend to rely heavily on interruption marketing to sell new products and new offerings to their existing customers. This is a well known marketing fact : selling a new product to an existing customer cost 7 to 10 time less than selling the same product to a new customer.

In a sense, I think that Open Source companies operate on a much more leaner business model than the closed source one and that marketing/sales is not in their ADN and is not their priority. On another level, Open Source companies can be seen as start-up/immature companies compared to some of the players in the IT market that exists since 20+ years with an established sales, marketing and partner management department.

My answer was that Open Source is essentially a buyer market, not a vendor market. If you want to select an open source software, you can certainly find between 10 and more than 1000 open source product depending on what you are looking for (ex: a Web Server, a CMS, etc.). As a consequence, you have to define your need carefully, select one or several open source solution and then evaluate the maturity of the solution.

In a sense, it is a very different experience than buying a proprietary product or even more easily done, fill a PO and acquire a new proprietary solution from you existing supplier...


Opportunities

As always, I think that all those problems are great opportunities : how can Open Source company embrace those problems and provide a better service to the medium business market ? How to lower the barrier so that FLOSS can become mainstream ?

Do you have similar experience about medium businesses and FLOSS ?

The end of the (Linux) desktop as we know it ?

Embedded Linux : common trends

More and more of the Linux ecosystem (PC hardware vendor, phone hardware vendor, search engine giant and more recently a well known Linux distro, Ubuntu) uses Linux as an embedded system for the desktop. Some examples to illustrate this trend :

• Asus Express gate embed Linux in the motherboard. You can have, in a few seconds, a browser, skype, etc.
  
• Google Chrome OS : not yet released but it is define as the Web OS with a minimalist/zen approach (like an OS based on Chrome, the browser)
  
• Mobile platform : you'll have plenty to choose. ARM based : Symbian, Meego, Android, etc.
  
• Last but not least, Canonical announce "Unity", a minimal/Zen OS that will be available to OEM but can be nonetheless deployed on Ubuntu Lucid and later.

Major desktop environment (Gnome, KDE) : things of the past ?

One interesting Linux specificity is the fragmentation of the windows manager market. No other "mainstream" operating system has such a complexity : the window manager is unique and completely integrated (from kernel to applications) into the Operating system. Thanks to the XFree standardization, Linux is more complex : several window managers exist and have to co-exist.

However, on this level, things are changing rapidly :

• Collaboration between Gnome, KDE and XFCE (and others) is accomplished with the Freedesktop project. The project goals are to define common tools (like X.org), sub-systems (Dbus, etc.), API to ease integration and interoperability of the different window manager.
  
• Zen-ification : Simple is beautiful. Minimalist systems set the trend. Clunky interfaces tends to disappear and are flagged as bad design. Esthetic and ergonomic are the two main change drivers. Simplicity is especially important in order to "cross the chasm" and reach the general public.
  
• Cloud computing : Browsers are the key to the world these days. An interesting point to notice is that none of the desktop environment are relevant in the browser war : they use/integrate a major browser based on user choices (OK. they provide a browser but ... those browsers do no exist on the larger scale of the Internet!).

Negative impacts for the (Linux) desktop

• With the cloud, more and more users will be completely satisfied with a browser. As a consequence, users are more likely to care about their browser and the associated information (bookmark, session, password, cookies, etc.) than about their desktop. Major browsers offers a form of cloud synchronization : Mozilla Weave and Chrome Sync (with a google account ... of course) are leading the pack here. Those tools contribute to free the user from the desktop : everything can reside in the cloud.
  
• Even if a desktop is less and less relevant, migration from 100% local applications (PC) to a 100% cloud will take time. During this time, a desktop is still needed but this is an end-of life situation for this product line. The fact that major players roll out their own desktop environment is a sign that current desktop environment do not meet the needs of the future. Instead of improving the current ones, major organization decided to ... create their own. Asus with Express Gate, google with Android and soon Chrome OS and, more recently, Canonical with Unity.
  
• The direct consequence is a form of "commoditization" of the different desktop environments : they all look alike and most "regular" users don't really care. The differentiation factor is small/difficult to point out : only style, look and feel is experienced by the user after all !
 

 

Positive impact 

• Linux everywhere : after the servers, here come some form of "desktop". The platform is now very popular and we can see convergence between mobile phones, netbook, mobile internet device, etc.
  
• Hardware support ... will become better and better on the "desktop". As more and more hardware manufacturers provide an embedded Linux, hardware support will become a non-issue. Most components are standard and this will lead to a well supported platform for the desktop.

Conclusion ?

The value is shifting from desktop environment and desktop applications to browser and cloud applications. The direct consequence is that the Linux desktop environments should unite and work more closely together in order to address this need.

This will not be an easy task as lot of flame-wars and ego-wars will have to be resolved : the feud between the different windows manager is long-lasting and not really decreasing. Key projects like Freedesktop are very important in this regard.

Major players created their own "non-desktop environment" to provide a zen-minimal environment that contain a browser and some additional technologies (video-conferencing, etc.). Those players decisions should be a serious wake-up call for the window managers : a major hardware manufacturer, google, an open-source friendly distribution editor (Canonical with the recent Unity announce) decided to create their own "desktop" environment. Those products will be delivered to millions of users...

At a certain level, one can say that the battle is already lost : the current desktop environments can not really fight this war as they don't own the key technology : the browser. As a consequence, the risk, for them (Gnome, KDE, etc.) is to be a tool that will launch a browser. A (relatively) simple tool that can be easily changed with almost no user impact...

The Cloud : at least an environment that favor open-source !

What is the cloud ... without its marketing tag ?

During the 2010 think tank in Napa, the cloud was very present. One of the question was about the "threat" that the cloud represents for Open Source. This is funny because some very well in informed participants mention some key statistics. The major player in the cloud field, namely Amazon and Google, run an open-source (linux based) solution for their cloud.

Some unofficial statistics mention that more than 90% of Amazon EC2 instances run ... Linux. At some point, one could define the cloud as an Open Source OS + Open Source virtualization.


Why open source matters ?

Price of a computing cycle, bandwidth, RAM and storage are going down because of various factors including Moore's law (processors, memory) and unprecedented market size increase : developing countries are now entering in the digital age and crossing the digital divide.

An old open-source theory stated that, when the cost of a computer will reach 250$ then Open Source software will be in a strong position because it will be very difficult to pay hundred of dollars for ... software (was not able to find the reference but this is not my theory, feel free to comment and I will correct this blog entry).

I think that Open Source allows the cloud to exists : as the cost of servers get under 2500$ (lets assume that a server can be used by 10 users, we will find the same kind of ratio as for the initial prediction). In this context, when you manage 100 000s of servers, should you pay for ... operating system ? virtualization layer ? etc. In fact, most of the cloud players (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.), as start-ups, rely exclusively on open source. Constraint drive innovation and I really think that the present scale of those companies is a direct consequence of their platform choice : using any type of closed source software would have hurt the control on their platform and kill any innovation in the egg.

From and end-user point of view, the number one OS vendor (Microsoft) adapted itself to the cloud in a very reactive mode. In order to use a proprietary system in the cloud, you have to pay an extra 10c/hours/EC2 instance. If you use 100000s of hours, should you pay this tax ? Should you port your cloud-software to ... Linux ? At a certain level, RedHat and other licence-based commercial distros have the same problems : they have to somehow "rent" you your licence so that you can use them on the cloud. Once again, why pay for this and not use ... a freer distro like Debian or Ubuntu or even Fedora, CentOS or OpenSuse ? As a customer, no doubt you will consider alternatives and cost/benefits as it


What of the dominant players ?

While there is different players, I will concentrate on Amazon as Amazon is clearly in the leadership position : they published the API and offer a multi-tenant cloud infrastructure that is very cheap and very ... scalable. Scalability is not the problem of the user anymore at least from a hardware, storage and bandwidth point of view. However, applications scalability on the cloud is a very young and immature science ;-)

The EC2 API is in the process of becoming a de-facto standard and most of the cloud provider build their solution on top of this API. Others, like Eucalyptus, re-implement the API with a different toolbox (i.e. : other virtualization technologies) and as an open-source : you can have your own private cloud on your servers.

The Cloud : at least an environment that favor open-source !

If you look at the proprietary/closed-source/traditional licence-based business model they have to adapt to the cloud and somehow switch from a multi-instance architecture to a multi-tenant one. They also have to switch from a per-user licence to a per-usage model.  This involves all kind of interesting gymnastic like the one Microsoft did : 10c/hour/instance. If you "rent" an instance for one year, your cost for MS Windows in the cloud is .10$*24*365 = 876$. Very expensive IMHO : they don't really believe in the cloud. If you are doing the math, you better buy a bunch of  server licences that includes 5 VM : this will be way cheaper.

On the other hand there is no cost involved and no change required to any open-source software is you want to run it on the cloud : just do it ! No licence change, no hassle, almost no difference from a regular deployment in your data-center, no supplier to contact and ask "if you can run it on the cloud/how you can run it, etc.", no special provisioning (to have your precious licence number for each instance or to connect your licence server to your instances).

Moreover, open-source companies that develop open-source software already have a business model that is compatible with the Cloud : their software is already freely downloadable and can be run on any computer. When the old license-based model is used then some adaptation on the business sides of things, for instance usage based vs instance based. When a service-model is used, then no change is needed.

This can be a great opportunity for Open Source : a virgin territory without any legacy players and a business advantage because there is no need to change the existing software to benefit from this new market...

Switch : When change is hard. A change management book !

Introduction

Another book about change management could certainly be your reaction when reading this review. The Heath brothers are well known for the bestseller "Made to stick". In "Made to stick" (this is a recommended reading ;-), the emphasis is psychological and human centric : this is a (vulgarized) psychological book that propose a model for human mind : rational mind and emotional mind. I think this is important to mention because "Switch" is compatible with this psychological model and both books work well together.

Change : if was easy, it would already be done !

Change is, by definition, hard. If it was not the case then ... it would already be done. As a consequence, the second part of the title is somehow redundant but that is certainly a good marketing coup ;-) The second part of the title has at least one virtue : it explains clearly what he book is about "How to change when change is hard". I've read in an unidentified source (don't remember!) that the greater the success, the harder the change. 

How to help large organizations to contribute open source project ?

Context

During the 2010 thinktank in Napa, one of the participant asked the audience the following question "How could we help organizations to contribute to Open Source software".

The problem is the following : most of the large organizations rely on open source software one way or another. There is not necessarily an official policy about FLOSS usage but system engineers and IT administrators & developers tends to use and deploy Open Source software.

In this context, and because, more-often than not, this software is critical to one or several business unit, in theory, it should be easy to contribute.

Hypothesis : IP protection and no open source policy

The problem is more acute for large organization because there is, more often than not, a legal department and some policies are in place to guide workers. Those policies are in place to protect industrial secret and more generally IP of those organizations.

In those organization, more often than not, there is no open source policy : open source leaders do not necessarily have corporate support and, as a consequence, those projects tends to be hidden/not widely publicized.

How to improve the situation : patchs & minor contributions ?

A public Open Source policy (like the one from the government of California) should be published : the goal is not really to have non-open source users contribute but simply to help open source projects to become more publicized inside the organization. It is a clear sign that Open Source is welcome in town !

Lawyers should become involved at this point in order to define a "contribution policy" for the organization. The main question to answer is : Is the corporation OK to contribute with his own name and (c) on the code or not (for marketing, business or fear of liabilities reasons).

If the organization is OK to be involved and become a more or less official contributor of the projects then, proceed to next step.

If the organization is not OK to be involved, the idea is to use a partner : more often than not an Open Source integrator that will be able to somehow "white label" the contributions and, as a consequence, cut any potential liability between the organization and the contributions (as a matter of fact, we already did this for several customers : they did not want their name to appear in the patch for various reasons).

Once this legal issue is defined, then the CIO should then publish a "contribution guideline" that officially allows and encourage bugfix, patches, documentation update and contribution to be made by internal IT either directly or indirectly (via a partner). The goal of this guideline is not, once again, to _force_ contribution : it simply show the path and will make contributing easy and possible for everyone in the organization.

As contribution become more common, good practice should be encouraged : an internal blog or intranet can be set-up to list every contribution in order to reinforce the positive attitude and to create rock stars among their peers : top contributors could be awarded some really cool things like ... attending the developer meeting of their proffered technology, attend training session or technical training, etc.

Contributing to a community is a good thing and you could then suggest the marketing & communication department to publicize your contributions to the open source community. HT department will be interested as well by this as you will be able to attract highly skilled and motivated IT professionals.


How to improve the situation : major improvements, plugins, new projects ?

In this case, the situation is a bit more complex. We did several consulting sessions for customers that really wanted to open source either a complete project or certain area of the code. Most of those projects were initiated by the IT department and let's say that the relation with the legal department was very very conflictual.

One of the root cause of this conflict is the fact that the legal department was not part of the initial project team, they were seen as a necessary evil and ... they behave as such ;-)

Lesson learned : please, involve your legal department as soon as possible. Propose them to work with a lawyer firm specialized in open source IP and licensing. Have them have lawyers luncheons and let them decide of the funny things like license and IP management for the project. 


Initially, I would recommend to start with small scale project. Ideally, select an existing add-on, plugins, piece of code. Once you can have a small success and contribute one component, you can expect the process to become more and more routine like.

After some successful projects, we could even envision an official "open-source policy" for any project that is not part of the core business/specificity of your organization but I don't think that this should be a goal : this is a consequence of the normalization or major contribution. The same concepts apply : you should celebrate success, list contribution and eventually publicize them !

Before any open-source release, you should have a process in place. The process could be very simple (in our company, this is a very simple form that ask for the Open Sourcing of a project) in order to make sure that : you own the code that you want to open source (it seems evident but ... is it ? Do you have cut&paste some code snippet, have some of your code been developed by sub-contractors, etc.) and then you can make sure that the code is not something you want to offer to your competitors. Finally, you can select the appropriate license based on your own legal department advice but also based on the type of license in use by this specific open source community.


Conclusion


I think that those small steps could really help large organizations to contribute more to the open source software they are using. Those ideas are grounded, easy to implement and easy to put in application. 

• The "contribution barrier" will be lowered inside the organization
• It will reveal a clear path for open source contributors
• It will reveal a clear path for starting open source projects
• Legal department will feel respected and part of the solution
• Internal publicity (blog/intranet) will reinforce the process inside the organization

Ubuntu : I am because we are (book review)

When I noticed this book in Washingon Dulles airport, as a Ubuntuer myself, I did not resist the urge to buy it ;-)

My initial understanding of "Ubuntu" was the one stated on Ubuntu Site : "Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'Humanity to others', or 'I am what I am because of who we all are'. The Ubuntu distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world."

As such, I was already genuinely interested by the subject and surprised that it was a much more complex and structured philosophy than I expected. For more on this subject, please consult Wikipedia Ubuntu_philosophy page.

The book is very easy to read and lightweight : this is a kind of initiatory novel where the hero evolves from a stressed, social hurt, on the edge of loosing his job because of work-induced problems (recent evolution to a managerial job, overtime, no family life/divorce, etc.) to a much more ethical and peaceful state of mind. The company will be transformed as well by this philosophy.

The change agent is a young man from South-Africa that happens to embodied the Ubuntu philosophy : he _is_ Ubuntu ! The large corporation where all the characters are working is in a difficult position : the financial crisis is partly in cause and the ethics and core values are not shared anymore by the employees. Business units operates independently and everyone wants to reach its objectives without consideration for the other humans and business units.

The Ubuntu philosophy is explained, on step at a time, and it is truly revealed when, a team is visiting South-Africa thanks to a HR department contest.

But what is Ubuntu ?

Instead of citing passages of the book, I will refer to the Wikipedia Ubuntu_philosophy  page :
Archbishop Desmond Tutu further explained Ubuntu in 2008:

One of the sayings in our country is Ubuntu - the essence of being human. Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can't exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness. You can't be human all by yourself, and when you have this quality - Ubuntu - you are known for your generosity. We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole world. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity.

I have found numerous common point with Buddhism (that I practice) in particular the respect ("don't be evil") and interconnection of every human being (but not only!).

This book is very easy to read and very inspiring as it reunite the "evil" corporate world (especially since the financial crisis) with a more ethical world. While I compare Ubuntu to Buddhism, the book is not religious or even philosophical : the wisdom of Ubuntu flow slowly as the book plots and characters appears. They progress along the path as the reader discover the Ubuntu philosophy.

Out-standing Employer

I'm very proud to be the CEO of a young company that recently obtained a certification called "Out-standing Employer" (Newspaper link , in French only : Employeur Remarquable). This certification is original because the auditors are all the team members (this is very different from most certification, like ISO9001:2000 where official auditors are not members of the team : this is an external audit process).

The certification is done from two point of view :

• Every team member fills a 141 questions survey that is completely anonymous (i.e. : managed by a third party that will not reveal the individual results : only averages and only for groups > 5 people). This is a key advantage compared to internal survey : truth can be spoken out !
  
• Managers fill the same 141 questions and are conducting an auto-evaluation of the sames practices.

During the same process, the importance of every criteria is assessed by the team members and managers.

This gave a very interesting managerial practices :

• What the team members define as important vs what the manager define as important
• The performance evaluated by the team members vs the performance perceived by the managers

Those results are then mapped on an Importance (X axis) vs Performance (Y axis) graphic as well as other representation (comparison team/manager, ratio performance/importance, etc.). Those graphs are very interesting as they allow team members and managers as well to :

• Visualize the strengths and weaknesses of the company managerial practices
• Rate, by importance, the managerial practice

The company (site in French only at this time) that created the certification is also providing an analysis of the complete data-set. They also generate an action plan :

• Strong points : What is very important for the team, perform well, but could perform better
• Weak points : What is performing OK/badly but is important for the team (65% and more importance)
• Analysis by age-group, department, physical location, etc. with corresponding strong and weak points (minimal sample size is 5 to have access to the statistics)
• Values of the company as measured by the survey : what interest the team members. This is a very precious results that you can use to recruit like-minded people that share the same value as the team.

The certification is awarded only to the teams that have 65% of the most important managerial practice that have a performance of 65% or better.

This certification reinforce my personal motto : " I prefer to work with motivated people than working to motivate people !". This is true, as far as I know, for partners, shareholders, investors, employee, customers.

What to do when a good executive (VP Operation) is leaving ?

Context

We/I recently hired a VP Operation (three months ago). Let's call him B. As a young/startup type company, it was the first time a manager was not coming from internal promotion. As such, we (HR, executives) knew that this was a risky operation. However, we ended up taking a long time discussing this possibility with the (then) candidate. Because we already had both a business relationship (we did some project with the candidate, then our client) and a partnership relationship (we build together a very successful city-wide community network) everybody involved was confident that the association would be a success : human fit was excellent, technical people that worked with the candidate were extremely positive and respectful, etc.).

Integration : can do better

Integration was OK but not great. Once again, we are much more used to integrate technical people/engineer/developers type than the exec/manager type and our tools tend to be technical/power user oriented. So my retrospective view on the integration was that it was somehow painful and we should do better next time (ex: provide a Linux thin-client & laptop early on, FF with bookmarks for our systems, visit one or several customers ASAP, visit one or several prospect, meeting with our key suppliers/partners, etc.). So integration was good but could be improved.


Delegation : OK

This was, for me, the big unknown. As one of the founder of Revolution Linux and C.E.O., I ran most of the operations since the inception of the company and well, I was not very clear about what I should delegate and what I should not. My idea was to leave some space and then decide together what was my responsibility and what would become B.'s responsibility.

After one month, things were well set up : Portfolio management, product development and Finance/Administration for B., Sales/Marketing/Communication/Strategy for me. We were in the middle of a financing round so B. has to put lots of efforts and energy on those areas.

Moving full speed : not OK

Well, with all this define and everybody now ready to change things, I was pretty confident that we were going to full speed in the following months. I was feeling some "holding back" from B. on certain subject. I was then attributing this behavior to the fact that I'was/am very busy and spend most of my time out of the office (hey ! that was the goal after all!) so building our relationship was slower than planned. My reaction was to give more space and confidence proof to B. : this was supposed to demonstrate my confidence in his abilities, skils and define more precisely his area of responsability.

Announce day : feeling ... good !


One day, B. as a seasoned executive asked for a meeting and told me the news in a very professional way : he made his decision and was going to leave. His old job was still open and he was going back to his old position. Already was ready: list of hot projects, task list, plan, etc. We decided about the communication plan and who will be contacted when.

Well, first of all, of course I was surprised !

But I was not necessarily in a bad state of mind (i.e.: angry, etc.) when exiting his office and that's because one of my core value is the following : "I want to work with motivated people, not working to motivate people". So, in my heart, I knew that someone that is not motivated will be a liability for the success of Revolution Linux. The higher the position, the worst effect it can have on all of the teams.

So in a sense, I think that the world would be a better place if everybody was displaying the same courage : knowing when to leave and being able to do so without frustrating anyone is, for me, a proof of respect and courage. I would even add that the sooner you announce it (after you decided!), the better it is for all the parties. Don't wait a day : make your plan and announce it as soon as possible.


As a consequence, I have a lot of respect for B. and his course of actions and I really hope that we will keep a good relationship (even if is no more part of the Linux Revolution ;-).


Immediate reaction

Well, the first thing I did was to move my office back in B.'s office. In the following months, I'm in charge of all the company, not only the Sales/Marketing department and I did not want anyone to have a single doubt about this.

Communication : decide how to communicate and announce this the team (well, not me directly : planned holidays)


Professional todo update : decide what would be my next actions because I was suddenly taking ownership of every of B.'s projects.



Lessons Learned

Emptiness/void point of view : 

• This can be seen as a failure to integrate a highly skilled individual
• It can also be seen as a failure to motivate somebody.
• Time loss (recruitment process, integration, etc.)

Positive point of view :

I really think that focusing on the emptiness is an erroneous view of the world : each individual experienced the world in a unique way. It is not our job to "integrate" or "motivate" people. We can only offer our best and a good platform that will lower the entry barriers and allow individuals to express themselves.


If this environment and platform is not working for them, the sooner it is over the better.


In the process, I've learned a lot more : I asked myself some hard questions (I am still fit for the job, is it my passion, is it in sync with my core values, etc.) and the answer was yes for all of them ! 

During his time with us, B. was able to reform certain processes and bring his own experience to the table and this changing things in a very positive way

I've got a feeling : is Open Source at an inflexion point ?

Personal experience

Revolution Linux experimented more than 35% growth during the last year and things seems to follow the same trend this year. For us, it has been a great experience (not exempt for some growing pains !;-) and, when I look around, at open source companies, I can definitely see a trend.

Local Market (Quebec)

In our local market (Quebec province in Canada), we have more mature companies and they tend to have more people this year than the precedent (growth) and most of them seems to have find/defined a niche of some sort. Large companies are less and less generalist and have one or several specialties/focal points. We also experimented in Quebec some mergers between existing companies and this is clearly the sign of a more mature market.

Open Source at the International Level

At the international level, a continuous flow of Linux migration and open source adoption by companies,  as well as a bunch of acquisition/mergers occurs as well with, once again, a more focused approach for the existing players. Some leaders start to emerge with a sound financial model and extraordinary growth and profit.






Open source = competitive solutions

More and more, open source software is used/bought, not because it is open source/free (speech/beer) but because it is a good software (intrinsic value). The fact that this software/solution is open source is not the determining factor that make customers buy it. On a head to head competition with closed source alternative, a bunch of open source players emerges (Firefox, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Tomcat, etc.) and are in a position to become market-leaders.

In practice, a few years ago, when we started Revolution Linux, we mentioned "we are doing open source, this is great". These days, we say "we have an excellent solution for you. By the way, this solution is open source and this brings you several additional advantages ...". But clearly, the customers we are reaching now are not basing their choices on the fact that this is an open source software. They select the best technology for any given task and, more often than ever, Open Source simply compete ... and win.

"It's the fast that eat the slow"

A few years ago (10), Open Source companies where almost non existing and of very limited size. Open source software where ten time less numerous and had ten time less functions/capacity/line of code than today. If  "it’s not the big that eat the small…it’s the FAST that eat the slow" (see book of the same name by Jason Jennings & Laurence Haughton) is true, it means that open source development has proven that it is faster/more innovative than closed source development. And this will continue. But ... how fast ?

Inflexion point ?

My opinion is that open source is at an inflexion point : if the trend continue (i.e. : no major change from the competition, no major change in the environment, legal, financial, social domain), then the areas where open source is dominant because of its intrinsic value (i.e.: technical advantages, best solution, best product, etc.) will experiment a tremendous growth (exponential like).

Other open source solutions with smaller user base will either join the fast growing club ... or fade. Indeed, because several open source business model have a proven value, we see more and more companies joining the club and mimicking what is perceived as the root cause of the open source leader success. Some of them being coined with the not so sexy "fauxpen" term. Open or fauxpen companies fueled and increasing competition on existing solutions (including closed source one).

Open Source companies will follow the same trend : fast growing of fast waning.  In the last case, acquisition/mergers will keep the talent into open source and help fuel the fast growing company.

Next public speaking : Brainstorm K12 conference in Wisconsin

The Brainstorm conference will be held from the 28th of February to the 2nd of March in Wisconsin Dells. This is a dedicated conference for the IT+K12 world : the subtitle reads "For K12 techs by K12 techs".  K12 is a very particular domain where problems are somehow shared across the country and, I would even generalize a step further : problems in the US are the same as in most of other countries. Most of the K12 publicly founded education systems in the world don't have enough money to fulfill their core business.

In IT, this translate directly in terms of Student/Computer ratio. It vary from 3:1 to 7:1 depending on how you measure the statistics (computers that are older than 5 years, etc.). In the K12 IT department, the IT budget is only linked to the number of students, not to the number of computers that the IT department has to manage. Thus, increasing the number of computers really diminish the service quality : the same staff has to manage twice the number of devices !

All in all, we can say that education in general and K12 in particular can not leverage the power of networks and computers in a classroom environment : K12 schools manage scarcity while the IT world manage abundance (think Facebook, Google, etc.).

Open Source and thin-clients can certainly change this and empower students and teachers so that they can have one computer per user (when needed initially but, hopefully in a near future ... always) and, as a consequence, leverage the Web 2.0 and benefit from the global knowledge that is Internet.

I will present two conferences, one about large scale open source deployment in a K12 environment and the other one about Open Source thin clients, namely, the project Revolution Linux leads called LTSP-Cluster.

On another level, I will be co-chair of an Open Source round-table : my goal will be to make sure that every participants gets at least one of his question answered. We will prepare some questions and define the format. I will post our efforts on this blog.

Sessions that we will present :

• Break-1841 - The New 1 to 1: Scalable and Affordable Ubiquitous Computing Using Open Source
  
  In this session, you will see how the concept of "Ubiquitous Computing" could help bring your 1:1 project to life by removing barriers that prevent access to technology. Learn to provide access to the same computing environment no matter the device or the location ! All this using Open Source technologies that can scale to your entire school district.
  
• Break-1820 - Open Source Social Networking Tools
  
  MySpace, Facebook, You Tube.... Students in your school district are using them.
  Staff in your school districts are using them. Come and see how others are using internal open source social networking tools to leverage learning in a controlled environment. Get your feet wet using various open source social network and microblogging tools.
  
• Break-1840 - A Comprehensive LInux Back-End Infrastructure
  
  This session will describe a cost-effective approach to a global open source back-end infrastructure large number of students as deployed by Revolution Linux in various school districts in North America. The main goal of these projects is to centralize various information services (such as file servers, printing services, email and collaboration tools, web and authentication) in order to better manage resources and to transfer expertise locally. Using open source software enables the school board to offer more efficient services, such as automated schoolwork management and the automated generation of school website CMS.
   
• Break-1842 - Desktop in the Cloud with LTSP-Cluster
  
  See how it is possible to deploy and manage a large number of desktops in a private cloud using LTSP-Cluster. LTSP is the Linux Terminal Server Project. Using LTSP-Cluster enables you to deploy thousands of desktop in a scalable manner. You will be able to see and test yourself features that those Linux desktop offers using Thin or Fat Clients, such as 3D support, multimedia, 3D effects, and much more. You will also see remote access of the desktop in the Cloud, and support for Windows Terminal Server.
  
• Break-1843 - Netbook and laptop management with Linux
  
  Know how you can use Ubuntu Linux Netbook Remix in your netbook 1:1 environment, and see the possibilities available to manage a large number of mobile devices like laptops and netbooks in a flexible and scalable way.
  
• Open Source roundtable
  
  Come ask your question about K12 and Open Source !

I propose the #k12brainstorm tag for twitters out there.
Also, I have create a linkedin event : http://events.linkedin.com/Brainstorm-11-0-K12-techs-by-K12-techs/pub/232369

N900 : A fully fledge Linux phone for non geek

N900 review

While the N900 has been avalaible for several month, I would like to review it and share my first month findings.

First of all, I'm a geek and having a Linux phone has always been part of my vision for a clear sky future. Of course, as the CEO of a Linux company it makes a lot of sense. Convergence is not simply a network issue but a platform issue as well.

But I will not (at least in this blog entry) detail and share the geeky functions. You'll find numerous reviews about the N900 on the Web with all the gory details like speed, CPU, RAM, etc.

The point I want to make is that this is geeky piece of technology has been designed for non geeks ! I was expecting some instability, command line, reboot and some other flashing and hackish magic (disclaimer : I _had_ to flash my N900 but ... I did really bad things and have been warned several time by the system before ... I obtain root privileges and finally broke the N900). None of this is mandatory and the N900 is great as is.

Convergence

My life has changed since the N900 because it integrates in a transparent/user friendly way all the communication tools I have to use on a daily basis on my computer at the professional and personal level. Now, my laptop is in my pocket: I can do everything with my N900 !

Convergence is, for me, a way to abstract the medium used to communicate to concentrate on the conversations and user interaction. Out of the box, the N900 support : gmail/google talk, Jabber, SIP (VoIP standard), skype, facebook, flickr. You can add some additional networks later on ;-)

An application called Hermes connect to all the social network/accounts you have configured and help you grab the information (birthdate, profile picture, etc.) and then you can very quickly merge all those separates identities into one of your existing (or not!) contacts (of course, as a cell phone, it manages as well SMS, landlines, cell phones, etc. ;-).

Engagement and discussion !

So now, whenever I have access to a Wifi network (yes, the N900 can use Wifi) or if I decide to contribute to the poor telco companies using 3G (the N900 is GSM compliant and can function on every? GSM network) I have access to a unified communication device.

All in all, I had more and more contact with people (in no particular order friends, prospect, customers, family, etc.) on very various timezones because I can carry with me the N900.

Who should buy it and who should not ?

Non geek

• you are not a hardcore fan of a particular phone brand
• you have the use of one or more of the social network I mentioned and want them to converge in an easy to use/integrated way
• you need a communication device with a keyboard : the N900 keyboard is very usable and I have been using it to review Office documents, write numerous emails, tweets, SMS, etc.

Geek
 Even if this is not the subject of my post, some arguments nonetheless :

• Maemo (Debian) inside : yes, you can have a terminal, become root and break everything, patch your kernel, mount samba shares
• You can install a chroot of your favorite Linux flavor
• 3D & multitasking
• Development tools : you can create your own application. Lots of example to build on
• Lot of cool open source applications (openVPN, asterisk, python, etc.)
• Some people reported success with ... Android (can be a factor for some but I'm not ready to change anytime soon!)

Scott Berkun "Confession" review

Book Review : "Confession of a Public Speaker", by Scott Berkun

I have found the Confessions to be very informative and to the point. In this book, Scott Berkun is somehow doing a complicated exercise : sharing his own experience of public speaking requires something that can be compared, somehow, to a kind of "mental strip tease". Most of the book is build around some episodes of Scott Berkun's life. Sharing very personal story about his life could have produced a boring and uninteresting book (aka me, myself and I) but this is not the case.

Because the book is very grounded, the experiences that are shared are always interesting and completely integrated into the story. Also, the book includes a lot of experiences from other famous (or not!) public speakers in order to illustrate certain points.

Several key points are covered in a nice chapter per chapter approach. Each of the point somehow resonate with my own (limited) experience as a public speaker and because of this connexion, It is very easy to understand and benefit from the book.


Occidental people in general and north american in particular tend to confuse theoretical knowledge and practical experience : after reading a book or two and after having watched a video or two, we tend to become very quickly a martial art master or a buddhist Yogi. Scott Berkun is very careful to destroy this myth in every bit of advice that he shares and I really think that this is a key point here.


Like Malcom Gladwell in Outliers (10 000 hours of practice of any activity will make you a world class performer) training and practice are at the center of the book. Exactly like a professional athlete, you have to practice and practice again, using camera or Webcam, until you are confident and the story you are going to tell, in public, flow naturally. Once you are comfortable with your talk/storyline (your performance but also your supporting material : slides, video, handouts, etc.) then you have a chance to perform well in front of a crowd. And back to practice again : the more you will talk to a crowd, the better you will be...


No silver bullet here : work work and work again.


I have found a lot of very interesting experience, hints and advice : how to repeat, practical advices on how to be yourself (somehow!) on stage, test the room where you will perform, what to do if ... the room is empty, you forgot your slides, the crowd is angry, etc. 


All in all a very honest and practical book that will benefit anyone that has to publicly speak. In my mind and in no particular order : scientists/students that have to present they research (especially M.Sc., Ph.D. : practice your show !), teachers of any level (how to engage your students), managers of any level (how to engage your employee), salesman that present during show/conventions/conferences (how to engage your prospects/future customers).