Dave Jenkins

Well, the Novell spin machine is trying to pedal, but they’re not pedalling fast enough. First we saw the Novell brass say they were duped. Then we saw them go to the masses with an IRC press conference. Now we’re seeing the justifications– Novell knew what they were doing the whole time, or something.

Well, as I learned in Film School, the message is in the media. It’s not what Novell is saying anymore, only that the story/angle/spin is changing so rapidly, like a teenager trying to esplain the beer cans found in the back of the family car to his father on Sunday morning. Meanwhile, Ubuntu has gone ahead and published that open letter I thought that Red Hat should. The community seems to be divorcing themselves from Novell, either overtly with RMS-type declarations, or quietly and discreetly by ‘just not buying’ the SLED10 installs that Novell was hoping for.

Pedal faster, Novell. Death by 10,000 ant bites is not a pretty way to go.

I just watched a video of the OLPC Interface, and I think they may have made some poor assumptions here at the start. For those who haven’t heard of it, the One Laptop Per Child project is a very aggressive idea intended to close the knowledge gap between the first and third worlds. Basically, governments can buy thousands of hand-crank-powered laptops and distribute them to kids in all the villages around the world. I applaud this project sincerely, but think they may have some core assumptions wrong in the details of the interface.

To wit:

• The icons along the bottom are simple, which is good, but some of them may assume western concepts: chat is represented by a cartoon talking baloon. Is it that way everywhere?
• To save a file (like in the wordprocessor), the child would click on a little icon that looks like a 3.5″ floppy disk. Who has seen one of those in the last 6 years?
• The web icon is a little globe– there’s that damned ‘wolrd wide web’ metaphor showing up again. Even Tim Berners-Lee regrets this metaphor. I guess we should be thankful it’s not a little spider. What is the most simple and universal icon that says “search for information”? It’s not a magnifying glass– that’s left over from Sherlock Holmes…

Perhaps the solution here is to open up the icon set for adaptation culture-by-culture. That would certainly be fitting in with the Open Source model, save on labour, and allow each group to get the best icons/interface going for them. Who knows? A gecko might be associated with ’searching’ in some parts of New Guinea. Moreover, it gives the Cultural Minister something to do.

I’ve mentioned before that my company uses MediaWiki as a platform for the intranet. this has been a huge success, but we’re still seeing some shortcomings. Namely: a lack of elegance around tabbed tables and spreadsheet-like numbers. Almost everyone in the company has contributed something to the”goat” (our nickname for the intranet), but more often than not, people still want to refer back to some excel (bleh) spreadsheet back on another fileserver.

Certainly, the mediawiki markup doesn’t handle tables very well. Ther are hacks out there to handle simple tabbed data, and convert it to a standard wiki table, but these are still ‘hacks’. Even then, there is no computational (read column sums for totals) abilities here. As such, managers still want to keep their inventory summary reports, marketing penetration reports, and general TPS reports in spreadsheets. It hurts the ‘quick communication’ that should come from a wiki– hence the name.

I think the core issue here may go deeper here. I have had numerous conversations with managers and others who try to publish on the wiki, only to see a cursory bullet list or series of abbreviations and summed numbers with no context nor explanation. The deeper issue here is that, despite all that time spent in humanities classes, I am convinced that most people do not enjoy writing. It’s easy to assume a shorthand when talking with other employees, as so much background and players in a conversation are common, and therefore “don’t need to be esplained”. This is an easy excuse to make, I fear. It deprives the reader of a proper context, and allows that reader to fill in his/her own details. No wonder specs go back and forth so many times.

For me, an important point to make between publishing on a wiki intranet and sending an email to your manager is: your manager knows almost everything you’re dealign with right now, and therefore may not need the full explanation; someone reading your wiki post may be clear on the other side of the company, or a complete newbie, or both. Without that context, the page will be of little use. Fortunately, wikis provide such easy linking that the context can be as simple as a few sentences salted with links to the entire background. Too bad so few writers see this.

Well, things continue to look sour for Novell. The Samba project has just declared that they “disapprove strongly” of the Novell deal with Microsoft. We all know that the Linux community is very very skiddish to start with, and now Samba seems to be putting some teeth into that disapproval.

I would expect Mozilla, Evolution, AbiWord, and other major projects to declare their distrust very soon, if only to appear on the right side of history. This is going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy: noone will trust the Novell deal, so therefore noone will deal with Novell, which only further erodes the trust and interoperability. Novell’s Linux days are numbered. And if Novell’s Linux days are numbered, then, well, Novell’s days are numbered.

Microsoft seems to be following a classic Klauswitz strategy: pick off the weakest members of an alliance, and instill fear throughout, which will make all allies retreat into themselves (and disolve the collective strength of the alliance). Novell is that weakest member: Mandiva is too small to matter, Red Hat is too zealous and big to try, and Ubuntu is too much on the desktop and not servers (where it counts). Novell, on the other hand, is known for its Intellectual Property foibles, desparate for cash, and known to ‘bend the spirit’ of the GPL. Microsoft gains a whole round of questions among CIOs and CTOs when considering Linux, and that gives them a shot in an otherwise losing battle.

Well, it looks like the hate and fear has begun. Sysadmins are starting their exodus from Novell SuSE.

Granted, Slashdot is not usually the most rational group of actors, but it certainly is the most commonly read board among all Linux users. I can imagine, and I have heard directly, that the Linux developers down in Orem are certainly thinking long and hard on this one. I would imagine that as soon as one or two of them go, then Pharoh’s control will start to slip very very quickly.

Let my penguins go!

Novell is at the crossroads. And I don’t mean that as a metaphor for some large decision or deciding which future direction to take. No, I mean it more in the Robert Johnson “I went down to the crossroads” kind of way. Novell just inked a deal with the devil, and I think they’ve grossly miscalculated.

The deal, from what I can tell, centers around some sort of ‘patent protection’ mumbo jumbo (a voodoo term for promises to the devil) and talks at length about commercial customers and legal stuff around jointly developed code. Gah. They’ve already lost me. I thought this was going to be something cool about how MS will play nice with Mono or that MS is going to open up some of their filesharing stuff under the GPL or some other Technological New Thing ™.

Nope. This is all about the suits. This is about that disaster we have for a patent office. This is about the Devil’s own children– the lawyers.

Two things don’t seem to have crossed the minds of our friends in Orem:

1. The community is scared shitless over this, and will avoid SuSE like the plague (go Ubuntu go!)

2. Novell’s own developers are probably printing their resumes as discretely and quickly as possible.

If I were at Red Hat, I would send the open memo to HR to publish an open call “We’ll hire all SuSE and Linux-related Novell employees immediately”.

The whole deal seems to depend on the idea the Novell will continue to publish linuxy goodness under the GPL but at the same time put some sort of induced protection (aka veiled threat) that they won’t sue my ass when MS comes a callin’ for my soul. Well, that shit ain’t gonna work if Novell doesn’t have any developers anymore.

Marc, Joachim, and all you other SuSE friends of mine– get out of there. I can hear the Old Man laughing already.

I got a mention in Network World yesterday. There is an increasing amount of buzz around the Linux desktop. So much that I may actually declare 2007 as “The Year of the Linux Desktop.” Certainly noone has predicted that before…

Actually, I really think that Ubuntu is onto something. Mark Shuttleworth recently described what is (IMHO) one of the most important factor for desktop penetration: skin-deep eye candy. The other two are that USB gadgets must simply work on the first shot and that people can view pr0n without additional drivers.