If it’s Saturday, it must be Michigan…

Arrived mid-afternoonish at the Detroit airport yesterday, and was picked up by Jorge Castro, who’s helping out the Pengicon folks by being a wrangler for guests of honor at the show. Enjoyed some good conversation and heavy metal on the ride to the Penguicon hotel with Jorge and Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon.

Enjoyed Jono’s talk last night, and then hung out with a couple of the guys from Ohio LinuxFest to talk about plans for this year’s OLF. More on that to come — I have been involved in OLF the past few years, and have been attending since 2005, and have a strong interest in seeing OLF continue to rock on.

Also enjoyed a Tesla Coil “concert” from the OLF room balcony. You just haven’t lived until you’ve witnessed a couple of ginormous Tesla coils cranking out tunes…

The vibe at Penguicon is a wee bit different than the usual Linux show. There’s also a major sci-fi contingent here, and it seems the programming runs 24/7.

I’ll be on a panel in a few minutes on “Linux for Casual Users,” and then I’ll be giving a talk on openSUSE at 6 p.m. in Ballroom A for those of you who happen to be at the show. Tomorrow, I give a talk on “10 Easy Steps to Becoming a Vim Expert,” assuming anyone is actually awake by noon to attend. Then it’s back to Florida for a few days before heading off to LinuxFest Northwest.

How’s your Saturday?

There’s a GNOME meeting later today (obviously later, otherwise it’d be pretty silly to mention it…) at 18:00 CET (17:00 GMT / 13:00 EDT) in #opensuse-gnome on Freenode. Fire up those IRC clients and head over to the #opensuse-gnome channel if you’re involved or interested in GNOME on openSUSE. The agenda can be found on the wiki, as always.

The next project meeting is on Wednesday, April 23 at 16:00 GMT, and the next KDE meeting will be held on Wednesday, April 30 at 18:00 UTC.

I was perusing my blog statistics this morning via StatPress, and found some interesting statistics. I was curious to see what operating systems and browsers were most common among visitors to my humble digs here, and the numbers are not what you might expect.

I also see a huge opportunity for the Linux desktop, when I look at these numbers.

With 25.1% of the “market” that visits this blog, Konqueror comes in a close second to… Internet Explorer 6. Firefox places third after Konq, with 22% of the visitors.

IE6 has 28.6% of the share, and then IE7 with 13.3% and FF3 is already climbing the chart with 3.4%. FF 1.5 has 1.8%, so if you unify the Firefox stats, it would come in second over Konqueror, but only slightly.

Operating System Stats

Operating systems stats indicate that Windows XP is still alive and kicking with 47.6% of the visitors hitting my blog using XP. I don’t have a breakdown of SUSE versions, just one lump sum of SUSE, which accounts for 36% of the visitors to the blog. Generic Linux only has 6.5%, and Mac OS X is the next OS, with 2.3%.

I assume that XP has such a strong showing because many people are visiting the blog from work (hello, slackers!) and/or surfing the Web using Windows while they do some research on Linux. I’ve also been linked from a few non-Linux specific blogs, so that is going to set the traffic stats a bit askew.

The other interesting thing to take from this is that Windows Vista comes in with only 1.8% of the traffic. More than a year after its release, Microsoft hasn’t managed to capture much market share with Vista, despite its marketing prowess. (If you haven’t seen that video yet, go watch.)

I think we have a window (no pun intended) of opportunity here to capture some of the elusive desktop market share. Microsoft is playing catch-up, for a change. Its customers don’t want Vista, and it is having trouble reconciling the market’s desires with its corporate strategy.

Right now, Vista’s biggest competition is XP — we need to change that, and make sure that Linux (and openSUSE/SUSE in particular…) is a more attractive option. We can’t assume Microsoft’s next release will be as bad or poorly received as Vista, so we should be focusing on the consumer and business desktops, particularly now.

SUSE and openSUSE users should be well familiar with the slogan, “have a lot of fun!” I’ve always loved that (and the persistent green themes that accompany SUSE) about SUSE and openSUSE. Have a lot of fun!

Even though most of us use computers to get work done, I think there’s a pervasive attitude within the open source crowd I know that it’s possible to enjoy your work and Get Things Done while still having a good time.

I was thinking about this today when reading Dustin Puryear’s post over on O’Reilly’s Port 25 where he says (I’m paraphrasing here) Microsoft’s problem in academia is that it’s all work and no play, but UNIX (and I’m arbitrarily including Linux in this), vi, gcc, Perl, and the rest of the kit are “more fun to play with.”

Puryear notes, accurately I think:

Most of the innovations in software are from people that tweak, fiddle, and play with concepts, code, and ways of doing things. And THAT is the essence of academia: The freedom to play and learn and make progress.

I believe this is true in the business world as well. Generally speaking, progress is made by those folks who are enthusiastic, engaged, and having fun doing tremendous work. But why is it more fun on the *nix side of the house? I have some theories of my own, but I’d like to hear some of yours first.

A colleague pointed out an interview with Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer, Simon Phipps, where he apparently responds to comments made by our CEO, (transcript) Ron Hovsepian, in a podcast with the Linux Foundation.

First, I think that the the crux of the issue that Ron expressed is a general frustration with Sun’s interaction with the Linux community. Many in the Linux community see OpenSolaris as too little and too late — an effort that would have been significant and possibly worth joining in on before Linux had matured into the enterprise class operating system that it is today.

While Novell, Red Hat, Canonical, Debian, and many others are working together on Linux as the platform of the future, we have Sun off trying to build its own community around an operating system that it has more or less exclusive control over. I have spoken to quite a few community members over the years that think that this is a distraction to “the mission” of promoting Linux, at best, and actively hostile to Linux at worst.

In my opinion, the industry has chosen to standardize on Linux as the Unix-type OS of the future, and Sun’s failure to join the party is unfortunate. We need a platform that is not only open source, but one that is not owned or controlled by any single player.

Sun had a choice of licenses when it released OpenSolaris, and opted to go with a licensing strategy that is incompatible with collaboration with the Linux kernel and many other projects. This is why many see Sun’s approach as trying to balance its proprietary and open source strategies. It’s licensing policies allow it to continue a proprietary line and development model, while also offering code as open source.

Sun’s policies regarding OpenOffice.org and code contributions have also hindered the project and limited contribution from outside sources. That might be why most Linux distros ship the ooo-build of OpenOffice.org, rather than Sun’s.

I would also like to see Simon or Sun back up the assertion that Sun is “the single largest contributor” to code on an “average” Linux disk. I think that the GNU Project, for one, might disagree with that one. The assertion is probably based on the size of OpenOffice.org, which is very large in terms of source code and is certainly a significant application — but also statistically misleading, really.

I don’t know where Novell stands in contributions to Linux overall, though I know we’re second in known Linux kernel contributions recently, and we make significant contributions to GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice.org (though Sun won’t accept some of them…), and many other open source projects.

I’m happy to give Sun credit where due — they do contribute a great deal to open source projects like GNOME, and of course they have done great work with OpenOffice.org. So has Novell, and I don’t think we get the credit we deserve, either.

As to the question of OpenSolaris and where it’s going. I think it’d be unfair to say that OpenSolaris is “going nowhere,” but it’s tempting to see it as the open source equivalent of Ralph Nader. A distraction that may just ensure that the wrong platform succeeds in the end.

The first day of LugRadio Live was a blast — arrived at the Metreon bright and early to set up the booth and check in about 8 a.m. The LRL staff were already there setting up, and were amazingly cheerful at such an obscene hour of the morning. (All the more remarkable, given the fact that I understand most of the staff were out quite late the night before.)

The atmosphere is markedly different for LRL than most community shows I’ve been to. It’s every bit as friendly — but it’s a little less techish, a little more Lollapallooza. We set up booths with a soundtrack of AC-DC and other assorted loud music, and the entire show had a bit of a festival feel to it. The organizers have done a fantastic job, and I hope the U.S. version becomes a regular thing. (Though I wouldn’t mind going to the UK for LRL either…)

I spent most of the day at the openSUSE booth, handing out the Banshee shirts we made up for the show in honor of Banshee’s pending 1.0 release and Aaron Bockover’s talk at LRL yesterday. If you’ve heard rumors about Mr. Bockover running about the show in his skivvies, I’m afraid that — yes — they are true. No, I don’t have pictures — I’m still trying to get the image out of my head, actually — but I’m sure someone does.

Banshee t-shirt

I also gave a talk in the, shall we say cozy, Lightning talks room. Some people may have trouble giving a talk in 30 minutes or less, but I didn’t have any trouble squeezing the topic (World Domination through Marketing: Learning How to Promote Open Source Projects) into 30 minutes.

After the show, and a short break so folks could recove, there was a Google-sponsored shindig at Jillian’s, which is attached to the Metreon. It seemed like lots of folks turned up, and were having quite a good time. We’ll see how good this morning.

Today’s the last day of the show, unfortunately. I hope to catch John Buckman’s talk on Magnatune, and I would also recommend catching Ilan Rabinovitch’s talk on BytesFree in the Lightning room if you’re here and you have time. If you’re in the San Francisco area, drop what you’re doing to day (if you weren’t already headed to LRL…) and join us!

It seems everyone is doing it. So, who am I to resist?

Open a terminal and run:

history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head

You should see something like this:

204 ls
202 cd
89 vi
63 exit
54 mv
35 su
31 ssh
28 mkdir
27 scp
26 /sbin/ifconfig

Nothing terribly interesting. I don’t spend as much time at the shell as I used to, or at least I don’t spend too much time at the shell on my local machine.

T.S. Eliot wrote that April is the cruelest month… I don’t know about that, but it is one of the busiest. (Then again, April is tax month, so he might have been on to something…)

In addition to jamming at LugRadio Live this weekend with Aaron Bockover, Miguel de Icaza, and a ton of other groovy open source luminaries, I’ll have the privilege of speaking at Penguicon next weekend — in fact, I’ll be on a panel and giving two talks (one on openSUSE 11.0, another on Vim).

Penguicon is not your typical Linux show — there’s tons of Linux goodness, of course, but also some awesome sci-fi tracks, and webcomics… I’m very much looking forward to hearing (and with any luck meeting) Sci-Fi author John Scalzi, and the genius behind xkcd.

A quick note for those of you who might be interested in testing Firefox beta 3, but also want to have access to the del.icio.us extension — an alpha of the next version of the extension was posted on April 4, which does work with FF3 beta 5.

You have to sign up for the Yahoo! group to access the file while it’s in testing, though. But, if you were holding off on this extension to use FF3 beta, it’s all good. I’ve used it over the weekend and yesterday, and haven’t run into any problems with it yet.

Also, FF3 beta 5 has been fairly stable — two crashes since I started using it six days ago, which is a bit of an improvement over FF2, so no complaints there.

Waugh Partners have released the 2008 Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report. It’s some interesting reading, if you’re interested in a clear snapshot of the Australian open source industry and community… (which I am).

One of the key takeaways from this survey, in skimming it briefly, is the importance of University and forming a relationship with open source:

Time spent at university correlates closely with the period in which respondents began participating in the open source community, particularly among the younger age groups. Exposure to Open Source platforms and communities during university years appears to be habit-forming.

Also interesting — the amount of respondents who ranked their open source skills as “self-taught.” Almost 100% of the respondents ranked “self-taught” as their first, second, or third option (next responses by rank: mailing lists, software projects, and University), with about 70% ranking it first.

What does that tell me? That programs around universities are very, very important to develop a relationship with potential developers.

Congrats to the folks at Waugh partners on a very informative report. OK, who’s going to step up with something like this for the other continents? Anybody?