Switching to Linux, switching to free software

This blog entry was first filed on The Tux Project in response to a forum question “What caused you to want to use Linux?” At “The Tux Project” people come and share ideas on how to promote Linux.
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First a little more about myself: I work in Bucharest, Romania, Eastern Europe.  My mother is a computer analyst/programmer and I had a PC at home since 1991. I went to a highschool where I studied informatics (mostly programming in Turbo Pascal 6.0, Borland C++ 3.1). Then I went to university to study, again, Pascal, C++ and Microsoft .Net. Now I am employed as a Java programmer for a proprietary software company. I know a few things about software security too. 

I know about Linux for 7 or 8 years. First contact was with some other students in my high school talked to me about that other operating system called Linux. They were using this Linux system for a while, so they were more experienced with it.
It sounded interesting but I could not give up Windows, as I feared the change would render my PC unusable. Then another student had set up a Linux server in the Informatics Lab. The server was access by telnet and we were playing MUD and netris (games with a cli interface) on the virtual terminals. The server was also hosting schools’s website and mail server, so we had pretty much to play with. This was my first meeting with bash.
And then I got a CD with Red Hat Linux 5.? or 7.2 from the Chip Magazine. I installed it, but all I new about Linux was that it’s free and it was hard to use. My X server was not configured out of the box (bug?), so I was stressing out other students using Linux. Then I had learnt about RTFM and the tomes of documentation I had to learn before using it effectively. If I did not know the cause of the problem -most often- then I did not know where to find information about it. Back then I did not know the power of aking for help on a public forum. When I asked other students about the problems I had, they said I’m on my own
and I should help myself. So if I broke something in Linux I would simply reinstall it, instead of trying to find a fix. This was a major barrier in trying to use Linux.
I think Linux lacked an entry in the help menu saying “If you have problems, post here!”

Since then I had been using Linux for short periods of time: I installed Windows, then Linux. Then Windows broke and I had to reinstall Windows, which resulted in Linux loader being deleted pretty frequent. Since I knew nothing I could do in Linux, that I could not do in Windows and Windows was familiar to me, the Linux partition was deleted soon after Linux Loader. Then I would not use Linux for another 8 months. When I discovered SuSE was amazed by its usability so I kept dual booting it longer than Red Hat.

This touch and go game I played with Linux happened for several years until the second semester of 2006. By now my Internet searching skills had been improved, so I had read a lot about Linux and Free Software. Because of fear of malware I was using only free software programs on my Windows XP (* more on this malware below), but I was not convinced to move to Linux. And then Windows crashed. My computer at the time was already having only SATA hard disk drives and Windows XP would not install without a SATA driver floppy disk. I had 2 floppy drives at home and lots of floppies to use for a driver disk. None of them were usable in Windows Setup, although they were just fine otherwise. You should note that I did not have a valid licence for any Windows version so calling Microsoft for support or going to a computer shop to have Windows installed for me were not valid options.

For the first time in my life I did not know what to do with Windows, so I decided to try again Linux. I tried several distributions – SuSE, Fedora. None could completely replace my Windows. Debian was rejected as I could not understand how can I administer the system without being able to login with root. Then I tried Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. I was impressed most of things worked out of the box. Then the same issue with root, only now I had made more effort on researching the problem. I understood it and afterward I started to love Ubuntu. I still had Windows partitions, but I had not use Windows partitions for a long while.

Back to the present: I got a new computer with SATA hard disks, so I decided to install Windows XP first, just to check out if anything was wrong with my Windows installation skills and possibly to check out hardware problems. After installing Windows, I installed Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) in a dual-boot configuration. However since I have the possibility of using Windows again, I never felt the need to boot Windows. Ubuntu fills all my needs now – even gaming.

First I stopped using Windows XP, because of their lack of security. I had to constantly check for antivirus updates and configure so many firewall rules that my computer became unusable. The time needed to keep my PC in working condition was increasing constantly. I could “pride” myself for having the “latest” worms on my network. A newly installed Windows XP would start to break after 30 – 40 minutes of working online.

Automatic updates were another pain in the lower part of my back. Schneier of BT Counterpane summarized very well some critics against Windows XP (and Vista). It was an article on  Schneier’s blog  that helped me decide that it was time to ditch Windows for good.

AFTER using Linux constantly for a while and taking part at a Free/Open Source Software Conference (Eliberatica.ro) I started to appreciate its freedom, which until then I could not fully understand.

I could not understand if this development model is stable and won’t shake down like a sand castle does when a big wave comes closer. When I finally understood what is pushing this system forward I went through full steam ahead.

Now I am struggling to learn more and more and I try to become a free software developer. Yet, my migration to Linux will not be complete until I become a successful free software developer. I want to at least be as successful as GNU Emacs which is still in development after 20 years since its inception.

Marketing Linux in the Free Society

I think it is wrong to promote Linux only by its features. To be sold, any product needs to have a unique set of “selling points”. Even if Linux has the unique features U, V, Z , no other OS has, this is not a strong selling point for it, because:

• new users are not accustomed to these new features, they do not use them, so they do not actually exist for them; instead they will remark that it does not has features X, Y, with which they are very accustomed from their previous OS

• at any moment a proprietary OS can copy some of these ideas (no patents, right?), and then it won’t be so unique.

We need something to differentiate us from the rest of the software products crowd.
The major selling point about Linux, about which too few people talk about, is that Linux is a philosophy, a lifestyle, a platform on which everybody can develop. Our marketing message should invite people to participate to Free Society. Imagine that your Linux message reaches a housewife halfway across the globe. The moment your ad finishes she should know that using Linux helps her to improve her cooking receipts: she can submit her receipts to a cooking receipts wiki, and then she should expect feedback from other readers. Show them how using Linux for sharing their work makes them more efficient.
Inspire yourself from what others write about Linux. Tim O’Reilly published the best description for Linux (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/articles/architecture_of_participation.html): “any system designed around communications protocols is designed for participation”. Imagine a logo containing that: “Linux, designed for participation”! Priceless!

Let me give you another perspective:
We need more contributors to the Free Software community, right?
Well, my take is, we aren’t getting any spectacular numbers of new contributors from the software industry. Surely the number of contributors increases steadily, just not as fast as in 1987 – 1997 years. We need to broaden our view and look for different contributors: graphic artists, office writers, psychologists, accountants. We need to get creative about what contributions we ask! 

Let’s take office writers and see how can they improve on our software: How many times did you have something to write down and did not know where to start? How would it be to have a template to start from? Proprietary software vendors do ship a lot of templates with their office products. Why are we lagging behind? Can’t we make a public web service that integrates easily into our free office suites? Publishing such a template could be as easily as “Save as”, and office writers that would submit their templates would get the benefit of improving the their initial template.
Did you notice I wrote about psychologists? You may ask what do we need them for? Well, I’m sure you heard about psychologists in usability studies of proprietary software. How many such studies have you heard of about free software? Very few is my answer. It is worthy to note that usability is the biggest complaint to our products. And it’s not like they did not offer their help, it’s that we never asked them.
 

What happens if a student accountant does her/his homework using free software and then publishes her work? Isn’t that the greatest proof that your accountancy programs do work? What happens, if in turn, another accountancy student improves on the exercise? It’s the same concept that arose with free/open source software, only that it is applied to other domains.

If we do want a free society to live in, we also need free content, not only free software. But right now most of the contributions to free society are in software development, which is not necessarily on top of the list of most interesting activities everybody can do. It’s like inviting people to a karaoke party, but requiring them to sing and read in Latin. Or giving craftsman’s tools to an office worker.

In short, we need to let users contribute what they want, not only what we ask them to. It must be easy for them to submit their work, not only our very much needed bug reports. Start enabling non-software developers do their work in Free Society! Put the right tools in the right hands! Take “Free Society” concepts out of our dreams and put it in our lives!

Better free software development

Is there a team of volunteers doing research on improving the ways we work to develop free software?

I mean there have been this far on-going debates over using mailing lists and archives versus web forums, but little is known of what situations one of the choices is better than the other.

Example1: Personally I vote for webforums for user support (see the traffic at ubuntuforums.org – I belive no mailing list supports that amount of traffic) and mailing lists for developers. I also think forums are better for noobs. But is there any volunteer project that tries to find which is actually better and in which situations?

Example2: So far much of the development talk has been done via mailing lists and the few time contributors meet at Dev-cons. What about achieving consensus over an IRC channel conference? Sure there are a lot of problems that go along with it, but it could be a nice complement to mailing lists. What about adding archives, voice-chat to such conference talks. Could screen-cast fasten development?

Archives and repository submission logs are just perfect for a statistical study measuring a project’s success or downfall. Could a statistical study discover lots of questions in a certain area of the project, faster than humans? Could this lead to a request to improve documentation in that certain area?

These are just crazy questions now, but, with a dedicated team of volunteers testing them out, goodness and craziness will separate.