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Linux doesn’t have a CEO. Consequently, there’s no annual keynote hosted by a charismatic alpha male. But if it did, and if there were a conference covering the first half of this year, the first speech would start with three words: ‘Linux is winning’.

Firstly, a market research firm in the US called The NPD Group revealed that sales of Google’s Android platform overtook those of Apple’s iPhone in the first quarter of 2010, propelling itself into second place behind the waning RIM. Android is becoming increasingly competitive, spanning both the smartphone and the emerging tablet markets, with devices from Dell and HP on the near horizon. This might be why Apple has started a patent infringement lawsuit against HTC, using many of its Android-based phones as physical exhibits in its litigation.

Secondly, Google announced its intention to open source the VP8 video codec. This was acquired when it bought On2 earlier in the year and it will be used alongside Vorbis and the MKV container to create Google’s WebM video format. This is vitally important for Linux. The nascent H.264 format, as used by Apple and many HTML5 video streams, is encumbered by patents, and current open-source implementations live under the shadow of legislation. VP8 and WebM have the potential to match it for quality, and while WebM will undoubtedly attract similar litigious trouble, having an umbrella the size of Google should satisfy many Linux distributions, especially when Mozilla, Opera and Adobe have already pledged their support.

Finally, the UK’s new coalition government has published its Programme for Government. There are two points in the section on Transparency that are great news for free software. One states, “We will create a level playing field for open-source software,” while the other adds, “We will ensure that all data published by public bodies is published in an open and standardised format, so that it can be used easily and with minimal cost by third parties.” If these promises come true, it will transform attitudes to open-source software and Linux, and hopefully open the door for its use within government and schools, two areas where it’s ideal.

Many of us used to think that for Linux to be judged a success, it had to be installed and running on more desktop computers than Microsoft Windows. And there are great swathes of Linux users who still feel the same way. But the world of computing has changed. There’s more than one way of judging the success of something that started as just a good idea.

Windows, Linux and OS X are survivors. They’ve lasted this long because they exist within their own ecosystems. Linux, for example, is fed by a curious mixture of enterprise investment, embedded hardware vendors and a community brimming full of zealous commitment. There’s a low-cost threshold to entry and a subsystem that maintains itself with very little investment. It’s these factors that have shaped how it looks, how it feels and how it’s operated.

The ecosystems inhabited by both Microsoft and Apple are equally well-adapted to their environments. The former is the domain of the utilitarians, offering straight functionality for an up-front price. The latter is an increasingly important fusion of fashion and function. But things have changed. The borders between the ecosystems have become indistinct. Apple has surpassed Microsoft in market value, winning thousands of new fans through it’s no-fuss interfaces and lower prices. There’s a shift in the balance of power.

And thanks to Google, Linux is becoming less free and less open, proving that in the new markets where it’s having the most commercial success, it’s becoming more like Apple. ROMs are encrypted and need to be rooted for user-hacking, third-party applications have to be sold through a single vendor and personal information is held in the cloud by a sole provider. If Linux wants a taste of similar success, it might find it if it makes similar concessions to a user’s freedom.

But then we’d have failed. The Linux ecosystem would have become too polluted, bogged down by sponsored kernel additions, paid-for support and short life cycles. It may be a commercial success, but no longer an active one. Our hypothetical CEO might make further compromises, and make judgements against the interest of Linux users. Which is exactly why we don’t have a CEO, and exactly why the success of open-source software is so difficult to judge using the same language as its competitors.

Tags: Apple, application, ceo, Computer, computers, Computing, desktop, device, embedded, Environment, functionality, google, Hardware, implementation, implementations, information, interface, iphone, linux, microsoft, Microsoft Windows, patent, Patents, Personal, Research, sla, Software, system, third parties, web, Windows

There’s a crushing inevitability weighing upon my shoulders: I am not notable. Ignoring the fact that I don’t turn up until page n of Google thanks to several actually-famous people sharing my apparently common name, my achievements as a journalist have amounted to, basically, nothing. I will not be archived.

Well, perhaps that’s not entirely true. The Library of Congress is currently hoovering up Twitter dust – including mine – and shelving bags full of the stuff for future generations to sift through. Won’t that be great? In 2020 you can relive the fun of me swearing at the Post Office or giving tedious updates on my yo-yo weight. My pathetic online rambling will live on, unsearched, unviewed and unreferenced, for eternity! Hooray!

Then there are the yellowing boxes of old PC Plus and PC Format magazines locked in some obscure basement of Future Towers. If you can get past the spike trap, traverse the invisible bridge and somehow avoid the rolling rock of death, perhaps you can pull out an old issue and cringe at the awful state of my early words. But I still won’t matter. In real terms I don’t exist: I don’t have a Wikipedia page.

I have done precisely nothing of enough note for my legacy to be cemented in a freely editable online encyclopedia, and that hurts. Computer badge at Cubs? Not enough. Appearing behind Terry Nutkins in the audience of the Really Wild Show? Pah. Even if some kind soul did add me – I’m desperate, but not desperate enough to write my own entry – I would be stricken from the database by someone so notable that they sit at home removing things from Wikipedia all day.

So, I would like to put forward these facts which prove I am deserving of an online legacy. Their value may be questionable, but that obviously doesn’t mean you shouldn’t add them to Wikipedia. They’re written down now. You can cite this column.

1) My fingers squirt butter out of the end. An unusual mutation, granted, but a look at any touchscreen that I’ve handled will conclusively prove that my digits spout greasy ghee at the slightest provocation. Bring a soft cloth if you’re planning to let me near your gadgets.

2) I am very tall. Some say I can dust the top of skyscrapers without having to stretch. Others just say ‘Oh, you’re tall when you don’t slouch’. How tall am I? Taller than you. Probably.

3) I am a master hacker. I once hacked into NASA. Sort of. I went to the website. Is that good enough?

4) I am a certified star-magnet. I sat in front of a bedraggled Richard E Grant on the tube. I saw Noel Edmonds – orange and suspiciously smooth-skinned – at a village fete. My wife and I hounded a rough-looking TV’s Nick Knowles out of a posh Bristol bar using the time-honoured technique of repeatedly pointing at him and shouting “It’s Nick Knowles off the telly! KNOWLESY!” Heck, I once peered at Philip Schofield through a restaurant window. I have connections, man.

5) I have released an album of painful electronic wibbling music. Well, I say ‘released’. I gave a copy to my mum, and a few to friends. I am almost certainly the only person ever to have listened to it. But that counts. IT COUNTS.

Finally I think my Wikipedia entry should end with a paragraph detailing my unmatched ability to talk myself out of a concept I was previously excited about – my own notability, in fact – in the space of about 600 words. It’s a talent. A notable one.

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Tags: Computer, Computing, database, device, electron, email, gadget, Gadgets, generation, google, iss, rms, space, web

There’s a delightful story that does the rounds regarding one of the founding fathers of Linux. It’s said that during the early days of the open-
source operating system’s development, this fellow took to attending conferences in complete silence. All attempts to communicate via means other than hand gestures were refused. Instead, he pointed at things.

Apocryphal or not, the tale remains highly relevant today. Our hero’s beef was with the windows-based graphical interface metaphor and its knack for turning us into mouse-pointing morons. Fast-forward a decade or two and astonishingly little has changed. The windows GUI has, you might say, proven to be extremely gluey.

The classic case study is Microsoft’s eponymous Windows OS. Admittedly, early versions of Windows would seem pretty alien to today’s users – but that’s an illusion. Look past the clunky graphics and Windows 95 is largely identical even to Windows 7, Redmond’s latest and greatest OS. Icons, taskbar, the folder metaphor – all are essentially the same as they were 15 years ago.

That’s a long time in any industry, but it’s an absolute eternity in information technology. Along the way, Microsoft has flirted with a few interesting new features. Early betas of Vista included widespread use of virtual folders and the promise of a fully vectorised and hence scalable graphical interface, for instance. But in the end, the retail build of Vista was yet another reskin of Windows NT, just a bit prettier.

Linux and Apple’s Macintosh operating systems have scarcely been any more innovative. More user-friendly and configurable? Perhaps. More polished? Certainly. But both remain firmly rooted in the window-juggling keyboard-and-mouse camp.

Compared to the enormous advances made in computer hardware, it’s all a bit bizarre. Back in 1995, a single-core Pentium processor running at 100MHz or so was your lot. That’s an in-order 3.1 million transistor chip with 8kB of cache memory, for goodness sake. Today, we’re up to six cores, multiple GHz, over a billion transistors and cache pools nigh on double-digits in MB.

If you think that’s merely a matter of scale rather than a new paradigm per se, what about features such as virtualisation or hardware-accelerated 3D graphics? That’s to say nothing of the rapid rise of LCD monitors and more recently solid-state drives. By any sane metric, computer hardware has been in a constant state of revolution. It’s utterly relentless.

So, not to put too fine a point on it, what gives with GUIs? The answer, frankly, is that I don’t know. Over the years, I’ve visited several labs dedicated to advanced interface research, including those of Microsoft and Intel. I’ve even interviewed luminaries from the heyday of interface research, including some who worked at the fabled Xerox PARC lab in Palo Alto. The very people who invented the GUI, in other words. In fact, I reckon I’ve spoken to all the right people. I’ve played with all the latest table-top, touchscreen human-machine interfaces. But I remain essentially clueless. Nothing I’ve seen or heard of is obviously the next big thing.

At this point, Apple’s iPad inevitably hovers into view. A remarkable device in many ways, it’s no good for data input or content creation and therefore doesn’t offer a plausible alternative for desktop computing. However, what it does is underline just how painful the Windows interface is. Once you’ve danced around a few of your favourite websites courtesy of the iPad’s delightfully responsive screen, the scrolly-scrolly, pointy-clicky PC experience seems pretty laughable.

Even a good smartphone can make the PC feel clumsy; I often prefer reading emails on mine. Replying to them is out of the question, but as a viewing device it’s very pleasant and provides temporary relief from what is becoming an overly familiar and oppressive desktop computing experience. You could say the differences are largely arbitrary, but trawling emails on my phone feels like a break from work. That’s got to say something about the tiredness of the windows metaphor.

Tags: API, Apple, Computer, Computing, cores, desktop, Development, device, email, Ghz, Hardware, information, Information Technology, interface, linux, Macintosh, memory, microsoft, Operating Systems, processor, Research, system, Technology, transistor, virtualisation, Vista, web, Windows, XP