GO TO XO

I have just started an informal “IBM XO Club” in the form of the page IBM XO Club.

For now it is a list of IBMers known to me who have ordered an XO and are willing to share that information. I’m hoping some of them will write about their experiences.

The XO laptop from the OLPC project will undoubtedly present many new business opportunities.

The XO has no moving parts.

The main (dynamic) memory is only 256MB. The disk is one gigabyte (1G) in the form of a flash drive. This disk is used to hold both the system software and all the user programs and data.

I can see two obvious conclusions from this, and I am sure there are many others to follow.

The market share of Microsoft in this space is now zero, and will grow at best very slowly. How many hardware/software markets have that property?

Lots, and I mean LOTS, of servers will be needed to service the XO market, both to provide data for use on the XO, and to retrieve the data that will be entered on the XO, be it in the form of an audio interview, pictures, video, data from instruments attached to the XO, and so forth.

[First published as December 1999: Three Predictions on November 11, 2007, this predictions made back then, especially about the increasing importance of open-source on a global scale, will come sooner than predicted, in part due to the arrival of the XO on the global landscape.]

Sometime in December, 1999 — as my days working on Jikes were coming to an end — I wrote a short memo with three predictions about how open-source would develop over the next ten years.

It’s now almost eight years later. Here are the predictions and my reasoning.

1. Red Hat will invest in creating the first true open-source Java, and so become the dominant supplier of Java in the free and open-software communities, giving it a major strategic advantage.

Those of us who were around back in the day when lots of folks cared about Java recall that in late 1999 Sun made lots of noises about standardizing Java via ECMA. I wasn’t directly involved in this, but I did know a few folks who were.

This effort fell apart in early December, when it became clear Sun was not going to give up control, a step that would be needed to make Java a real open standard.

I then felt that it was unlikely Sun would “get it” when it came to open-source, for at least a period of many years.

I predicted this would leave an opportunity for someone else to start a meaningful open-source effort, and as Red Hat then had substantial resources left from its IPO, I predicted they would do it.

2. I predicted that over the next decade open source would become more important outside the United States than within it.

Look at the per capita GDP numbers; for example, Wikipedia’s List of countries by GDP (PPP) per capita. The first four countries are Luxembourg, Ireland, Norway, and the United State. Luxembourg is a fluke since it is a small country with liberal tax laws that have drawn many financial institutions. The next three each have PPP of just over 40,000.

As I recall it, that number was around 30,000 back then, and the cost of buying one copy each of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office came to a few days worth, certainly less than a week’s.

It you look at the end of the list you will see that the Windows cost is not just a few days of work but can run to weeks or months.

This is just a roundabout way of restating the obvious, that what seems an acceptable cost in the United States is way beyond the means of people in the developing world.

I felt that entrepreneurs who wanted to build software companies in underdeveloped countries had only two choices. First, they could pirate Microsoft software, but that would fail for two reasons: it was unethical, and even if that didn’t stop them, then Redmond would stop them as soon as the company showed up on their radar.

That left open-source as the most promising opportunity. I also felt that the most successful companies would not be those that just replicated software written elsewhere to their own country but those that created new software uniquely built to reflect some aspects of the country’s culture. Hence there would be a need for developers who knew that culture, and the easiest way to build a team would be to get some smart programmers and teach them about open-source, so they could then shape it to their needs.

3. I predicted that, on a global basis, IBM would do better than Red Hat.

IBM had been operating as a global company for decades, and only had to learn how to do open source.

Red Hat had been in existence for only a few years. Red Hat had no experience operating as a global company, and so faced a much more difficult challenge.

I would score myself as follows:

1. Wrong. Red Hat decided to spend those IPO dollars on Cygnus. (How many people even know that Red Hat did so, or what Cygnus did before Red Hat bought it?)

2. Right, though we’ll have a better sense in a year or two.

3. Right.

You can make your own call.

[First published as on 2 November 2007, this post applies also to the XO laptop, though with less urgency as there is no immediate prospect that Windows will run on the XO.]

I’ve spent so much time lately saying that folks should take the “Leap to Linux” that I have decided to do it myself.

Lou Gerstner, IBM’s previous CEO, often said IBM should “eat its own dog food,” so I’m going to chow down on Ubuntu going forward, and will strive to reduce my Windows usage to the absolute minimum.

I hope soon to say my final farewell:

Goodnight Windows

We all love baloons, save those trial baloons filled with Microsoft’s Hot Air and Bluster

Marketing baloons, circa 1970. We seldom asked for money, just giving them away for free, like open-source. [1]

Evaluating the alternatives.

Technology changes.

Hasta La Vista, Windows.

It’s easy to sleep at night when you run Linux.

Linux and Open-Source is Microsoft’s worst nightmare.

Rest easy Linux. There’s lots of work to do tomorrow.

Notes:

1. I once mentioned to John Cocke that I occasionally sold baloons in Central Part, mostly for the fun of it. Every time I saw him thereafter he would ask, “How’s the baloon business, Dave?”

John was famous for wandering the halls in Yorktown. He would stop in someone’s office, ask what they were up to, make a few suggestions, some of which would then keep them busy for days of weeks. He would then depart. When he returned again, weeks or months later, he would often resume a discussion in mid-sentence.

[First published as Can you explain open-source in one sentence? on October 31, 2007, the comments there apply equally well to those working to promote the use and enhancement of the XO laptop.]

I’ve been working in open-source for about a decade now. For example, I have contributed code under an open-source license, I have run a project, and — though this is probably unusual — I have caused my employer to draft its first open-source license so I could contribute the code and run the project.

I think I’ve learned a little bit about open-source and so ask others who have worked in the open-source and free software communities the following question:

If you had to summarize what you have learned in one sentence then what would you say?

Here is my answer:

You must be completely open — holding nothing back — for if you hold anything back then you will lose trust, and trust once lost is almost impossible to regain.

What’s your answer?

[First published as Meet the Tuxers on October 30, 2007, I am republishing this here as the Tuxers have expressed a keen interest in working on the OLPC project and the XO laptop.]

Tuxers Smile on seeing Dave boot up Ubuntu

I work for IBM’s Linux Technology Center, the LTC. Though many LTCers work at IBM sites such as Austin, TX, and Beaverton, OR, most of them work at various locations throughout the globe, including the “Oz” team in Australia (LTCers there include Rusty Russell and Andrew J. Tridgell, “Tridge.”)

Some locations are thinly spread. For example, Ted T’so is LTC in the Boston area, and I am one half of the LTC team in Westchester, NY. (This was Dan Frye’s doing I expect, as he probably feared too many LTCers near the offices of some of IBM’s most senior executives might lead to our having a bad influence on them, or perhaps it was the other way around.)

The nearest LTC site to my home is about forty miles north, in Poughkeepsie, where there are about a dozen or so LTCers.

Since it is difficult to build and create relationships within a worldwide team, LTC management has created “Morale” groups at various sites, and as part of that, I journey last Thursday to Poughkeepsie to join a “Morale Lunch,” which is a high-faluting way of saying I drove to POK so I could chow down with some fellow LTC members, and then chat with some of them during the afternoon.

I took along many members of my Linux Menagerie, a group I call “The Tuxers,” for not only is the Penguin the mascot of Linux, the Penguin has been my favorite animal for many decades.

I took along a camera, both to take some pictures of the chow-down for inclusion in the next quarterly LTC newsletter (my manager helps put the newsletter together, and so had asked I take some pics while in POK).

I had a business call during the afternoon, and Diane B. suggested I use the office of W. Smart. [1]

I assembled the Tuxers for their first group photo in Smart’s office. It can be found at the start of this post.

Sad to say, on occasion I have to use Windows, and, when the Tuxers see I have fallen victim to the “Evil Empire,” they turn away to express their disgust:

Tuxers doth protest

The Tuxers were so disgusted on this occasion that they bent over so I could see the part of their body that best expresses their view of Windows. If you examine the screen closely, you will see evidence that even Adobe hasn’t yet figured out how to write software for Windows. I have suffered through a failed update for months now, as I noted in my post PDF: A Portable, Persnickety, Problematic, and Proprietary Document Format. [2]

I took along the Tuxers when I went to IBM Research yesterday to attend Eben Moglen’s talk, and you can find a picture of two of them on the podium with Eben in the post I wrote about the talk, Eben Moglen: Copyleft Capitalism, GPLv3 and the Future of Software Innovation:

Eben Moglen and some Tuxers

Tuxers observing Dave blog about Eben Moglen’s talk at IBM Research

I left behind my most valuable Tuxer, the one I purchased at Steuben Glass for about $250 several months ago, so earlier today I assembled the full group, in the company of the “Jikes Collage” that my daughter Jen created. Steuben Tuxer is in the top-right corner, near the “shaking hands” symbol in the Jikes banner:

Tuxers on a sunny day

Note the famed “Jikes Coupon” in the bottom center, a birthday present from Jen. (We share the same birthday.)

I put up our inflatable pumpkin last night. I got up this morning shortly after six and plugged in the pumpkin so children and commuters would see it. It looked so good when I returned from running some errands that I have left it plugged in, to make sure it’s there when the children come home from school. I took the above Tuxer picture just a few feet from the pumpkin:

Pumpkin Smile

Addendum: Halloween Morning

I woke the Tuxers up early this morning:

Rise and Shine, Tuxers!

I then realized the Tuxers had been unhappy as I have been using Windows XP on my back porch since I haven’t yet configured wireless for Ubuntu (I know it works, it’s just that I did a fresh install and haven’t yet configured it.) While at Staples yesterday I noticed there were some ethernet cables on sale, so I bought a few, including a 50 foot cable for just ten dollars. I then jury-rigged a direct link from my Linksys WRT54GL router — which runs OpenWRT LInux — to my back porch:

Note blue ethernet cable from window to back porch

I then booted up Ubuntu and showed the Tuxers that I was now able to run Ubuntu on the back porch, and that I had posted their picture on my blog’s home page:

Tuxers: “You get it, Dave.”

It’s a bit cold today, so I fired up a small space heater I use to keep my hands warm. The Tuxers then came over to investigate this strange new device, probably to see if it was supported by Ubuntu. I didn’t let them know that it was a heater.

Tuxers: Is there a Linux device driver for this?

The Tuxers are already #14 on the Google list of matches for “tuxers,” just a day after I first announced their existence. I’ll update this when they reach #1, and will flog this blog as needed to achieve that goal.

Notes:

1. Those in the LTC will understand why Diane suggested I use Smart’s office, for I was about to have a call with Mark V, a famed LTC member who has been continuously on the phone talking about Linux since before Linus started writing it.

2. (Added 10/31/2007) I just noticed that someone reached my blog by searching for “adobe acrobat error 1336,” proving I am not the only Adobe customer who has had this problem.

[First published as Open Source Divertimento K. 2007 on October 30, 2007, I am republishing this here as an example of a presentation to officials and others in the public sector.]

I was asked to give a brief presentation on open-source to a group of Austrian officials from the government and public sector on Monday, October 22, 2007. I learned that while the officials were guests of IBM, their trip was funded by an organization in Austria, and also that there would be software vendors present.

I thus made only limited mention of IBM’s business activities around open-source, and briefly described two proposals that I had handled that I thought were memorable.

The first was to honor a request by Prof. Scott Fahlman of Carnegie-Mellon University that he be given permission to take back to CMU work he had done while visiting IBM Research. This request was honored by releasing the code to him under an open-source license. Prof. Fahlman has gained some deserved recognition as the inventor of the smiley, for he was the first to use a colon followed by a right parenthesis in an email to indicate an emotion.

The second was to honor a request made by an IBM employee in the Netherlands. Knowing he had a a terminal illness, he asked on his last day at IBM that IBM release some code he had written as open-source, and IBM honored this request. (I described this incident in a post I wrote last year, Kaddish. )

Otherwise I based my presentation on my volunteer activities.

By way of introduction, I made mention that I had visited Austria in the summer of 2005, visting Vienna, where I stayed in a hotel that was in a building in which Mozart had once resided, as well as a visit to Salzburg, Mozart’s birthplace. So I began by putting up a video clip that shows some students at the University of Texas performing “Ecco La Marcia” from Mozart’s opera, The Marriage of Figaro, K492.

Open Source Divertimento K. 2007

Introduction / Summary

Welcome

Fanfare

I’m Dave Shields. I joined IBM Research in 1987. Philippe Charles and I wrote a Java compiler called Jikes. It was released in late 1998 as IBM’s first open-project. I ran the Jikes project throughout 1999. I left Research in early 2003 to join the team that manages IBM’s day-to-day activities in open-source. See BIO for more
details, and also the video interview Me Tube

eGovernment

Some things are so important they should be completely open. No company should seek commmercial advantage here. No member of the community should take advantage of another.

Examples:

• Humanitarian assistance: Sahana
• Public and other government records. For example, I have ancestors who were born in Massachusetts around 1650. How will my descendants access my birth certificate, etc.? Microsoft Word V2240?
• Improving the environment
• Pandemic response. IBM Research working on this
• Developing economies of underdeveloped countries: Ubuntu,
  …
• Fighting terrorism
• Honoring Fallen Soldiers

Education

• One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)
• Libraries, especially access to materials now in the public domain

IBM’s Commitment to be a Responsible Corporate Citizen

IBM has a commitment to be a responsible corporate citizen going back to shortly after the company was founded. Current work on this is supervised by IBM Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs (CCCA).

Corporate Citizenship: Sahana

CCCA approached me in late 2005 seeking help in encouraging IBMers with coding skills to support Sahana, a Free and Open Source Disaster Management system.

LTC Colleague Rob Eggers joined the team in March, 2006.

Rob was called while on vacation this past August, and asked to fly to Peru to help IBM Peru deal with the aftermath of a devastating earthquake. He spent a week there, during which he met with the Prime Minister of Peru. This is an example of the ways in which volunteer efforts can bring unexpected and valuable opportunities.

Corporate Citizenship: Reinventing Education

Former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner commits IBM to improving education over a decade ago;
current CEO Sam Palmisano honors that commitment.

I started blogging in early 2006. My first post is about
education. This is part of my volunteer work, done on my own time and my own dime.

I have published more than 400+ posts to date. Most are about open-source and/or education.

Highlights:

• Mozart
• About IBM
• A Brief history of Sahana by Sanjiva Weerawarana, by a former IBM Research employee.
• Guidelines and Report of the Licensing and Policy Summit for Software Sharing in Higher Education
• Sixth Sakai Notes – Sakai Foundation Overview, by Chuck Severance
• Ubuntu Posts
• On Education, Innovation, OLPC, And Open-Source
• On
  Open Content: Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web (today)
• K12OpenMinds07: Trip Report

Other Volunteer efforts:

• Announcing
  the formation of The Chay Project, and an invitation to be become a co-founder of the project
• Fallen Soldiers And Their Survivors
• Kyu Hyuk Chay, A Fallen Soldier

Resources

• Brad
  Wheeler, Prof. and CIO, University of Indiana
• Paul
  Courant, Prof. and former Provost, University of Michigan
• Chuck
  Severance, Prof. University of Michigan, Sakai Foundation
• Steve Hargadon,
  k12opentech.org
• Mike Huffman,
  Indiana State Dept. of Education

Thank You!

Andiamo!

Afterword: I had an hour-long discussion with Isabel Wang last Friday, as one of her recent blog posts helped inspire me to start the The Women In Technology Project. She said, after I had spent a few minutes describing some of IBM’s philanthropic activities, that learning about them had changed her opinion of IBM, and she now helder IBM in much higher esteem.

Notes:

1. Mozart was a prolific composed, though the world lost an unknown amount of wonderful music due to his death before the age of forty. His manuscripts were ordered in the form of the Köchel catalogue, a monumental piece of scholarship, and his works have ever since been identified by their “Kochel number,” usually abbreviate with the letter “K”. For example, the The Marriage of Figaro is K. 492.

I used K. 2007 in the title of the presentation as it was first given in 2007. I used “Divertimento” as my wife’s favorite piece of music is Mozart’s Divertimento, K 364.

[First published as On Education, Innovation, OLPC, And Open-Source on October 21, 2007.]

I used one of the new OLPC machines last week while attending the K12 Open Minds Conference for 2007 (k12openminds07) that was held last week in Indianapolis, Indiana. [1]

While I used the machine for only a few minutes, I came away very impressed by it, in part because of my recent thinking about the growing importance of open-source to education, and the shared sense of adventure and hope that I found at the conference.

Education

I am a computer scientist and programmer by profession. I have a Ph.D. in Computer Science and put the food on the table by programing from the end of the my freshmanyear in college for close to four decades, until early in 2003. Most of my programming from 1996 to the end of 2002 was released by my employer, IBM, in open-source form. Since 2003 I have continued to work on open-source, but in a role that requires little programming.

I do have some experience as an educator. While in graduate school in the early 1970’s I was hired by the NYU School of Education to work for several months on a part-time basis to develop some mathematical curriculum materials for students in the “Follow Through Program” in the Atlanta Public School System. (Follow Through was an attempt to show that the success of Head Start in teaching basic skills to young children could be extended to older ones.)

I also taught a one semester senior-level elective course in the Ada Programming Language in my last four years at NYU before I went to work for IBM in 1987.

Innovation in Education

While I don’t recall that I was very good at either of these educational jobs, I did learn a lot from them.

I have also been working for much of the last year on a volunteer exploring ways to use open-source to help educators.

I’ve given a few talks on this recent work,and also had numerous conversations about it, including many at the k12openminds07 conference. I have often said on these occasions that “Education is the hardest area in which to innovate.”

Now I could give a list of the reasons that might help convince you this is so, drawing on the experiences outlined above, but on thinking about this recently I have come to appreciate, that while I have not spent my lifetime in education, I have several direct experiences in the difficulties of innovating in education, some of which go back a long way.

My first experience with the difficulties of innovating in education began in the summer after the ninth grade, in 1959. That is almost fifty years ago.

My mother knew some folks who had just started a small company called Teaching Machines, Inc., or TMI. They produced what was called “programmed learning” texts. These texts, which I now appreciate were constructed in much the same way as computer programs, were based on the work of B.F. Skinner, a famous psychologist of the era. One of the co-founders of TMI, Lloyd Homme, was a Ph.D. in Psychology who had studied under Skinner.

Because of her connections, my mother suggested I try out some of their early materials. I started with their course on Statistics. I completed it in record time,and then set a record for matching or bettering the best score that tested mastery of the materials. I then went on to do the same for all the other course materials they had prepared, as a result of which they hired me on a part-time basis. I started in proofreading, then went on to write texts on my own, add review sections to the courses written by others and so forth.

These were very exciting days, both because I found school dreadfully boring, and the work at TMI was the first time I was treated as a peer by a group of adults. It was one of the most influential experiences in shaping my life.

Those days were also very exciting in that almost everyone in the company believed TMI was on the way to redefining American education,

Few experiences in life are more exciting, more exhilarating, more “heady,’ than believing you are a member of a team that will truly change the world. TMI was one of those experiences.

On rare occasions, the team may actually change the world. Think for example of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer and Microsoft, as well as Marc Andreesen, and many others who have achieved enormous success in the software industry.

More common is that the team fails, and the members move on to other jobs and challenges.

On other occasions, overconfidence can lead to disaster, as happened by my mother. Our landlord’s wife was also a psychologist. She caught the TMI “bug” and, believing there was money to be made, enlisted my mother in starting a small business that offered after-school instruction based on TMI’s learning materials.

That business nearly bankrupted my mother. I was fortunate in that I won a full tuition scholarship to Caltech, so she only had to worry about paying my room and board. Looking back, I doubt she had more than a few hundred dollars in her bank account when she put me on the train to Pasadena, and it took her years to recover.

TMI also failed.

Looking back, this was my first experience in the difficulties on innovating in education.

The next experience came several years later when I was asked to travel to the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana to evaluate a project called “PLATO,” as my advisor Jack Schwartz had been asked by the NSF to lead an evaluation team of PLATO.

My first visit to PLATO came around 1977. I flew to the campus with Ed Shonberg, who had recently joined the NYU faculty. We were met at the airport by two of the key people on the project, Paul Tenczar and Bruce Sherwood. They immediately took us to the PLATO lab.

We arrived around 7PM and stayed until 3 or 4 in the morning. It was probably the most exciting evening of my professional career.

PLATO was a project to create a new way of education based on computers. Only those who were part of the project or had a chance to observe it in action can fully appreciate the revolutionary promise it offered. Suffice it to say that within less than twelve hours I first observed laser displays, chat rooms, highly interactive educational materials, a new way of writing educational software, sophisticated computer games, incredibly fast response times, and many more things I can’t recall right now. Just trust me, it *really* was that good.

The team believed as solidly that they were going to change the world as did I while still in high school working at TMI.

PLATO, like TMI, ultimately failed, I think mainly because it was ahead of its time in that the personal computer wasn’t yet on the scene and so PLATO required very expensive hardware.

That was my second experience in the difficulty in innovating in education.

The third experience has come over the last quarter-century, the era of the personal computer. It’s one we all share.

Ask yourself, “What are the three major advances in education that have occurred during the era of the PC, advances that truly reshaped the way we teach?”

Answer, at least in my view, “None.” To paraphrase our good friend Holmes, who can be found in my recent “Dr Watson” posts, “The dog did not bark.”

OLPC (One Laptop Per Child)

I have been waiting for close to three decades to see an application of computer technology to improve education that was comparable to PLATO in its potential impact.

I finally think the search has ended. That would be last week, when I first had a chance to use a real OLPC.

I will write more in future posts to expand on this, and perhaps convince you to share the excitement I feel about this innovation.

Open-Source

As I said earlier, I have been waiting a long time to see an application of computer technology that can truly improve education.

I have been working in open-source for most of the last decade, and my recent work on exploring how open-source can help improve education has given my confidence that meaningful innovation will soon be upon us, and I take the OLPC project as the first real evidence that my confidence is merited, and that open-source will not join TMI and PLATO as failed efforts.

Though OLPC is still in its early days, I do think it will not fail, and that it will prove to be an enormous success.

The main reason for my optimism is that OLPC is not too early, not ahead of its time, in promoting a new technology.

OLPC is a remarkable piece of hardware design. The prototypes already available serve as a proof point that computers worthy of use in the classroom can be produced for under two hundred dollars. OLPC is particularly notable in that was designed to work in the hostile environments that are found in developing countries, where electric power and internet connectivity are not readily available.

But the main reason for my confidence is that OLPC is based entirely on open-source software, so that the cost of production is essentially solely the cost of producing the hardware. With the application of of Moore’s law, the use of commodity components, and the reduction in production cost as more and more OLPC machines are produced, the hardware cost will inexorably go down … and down … and down.

I believe that another kind of commoditization will help improve OLPC.

As OLPC becomes more widely deployed, there will be greater and greater interest in the underlying open-source software. This will have many effects. I expect that it’s only a matter of time until that software is as well-supported as is the Linux kernel itself. For example, assume two million OLPC’s are known to be in use, and that a serious security issue is then discovered. I have no doubt that an army of programmers would immediately form to track down and fix the problem, providing a level of support that IBM or Microsoft can only dream of providing.

Also, once a critical mass of OLPC’s are deployed, there will be a real incentive to develop new, high-quality applications. It is one thing to write a KDE addon or a Mozilla plugin that may be used by perhaps a hundred thousand users. It will be a whole new ball game once developers know that a good piece of code can find its way onto OLPC’s in use throughout the world.

What’s the critical mass? I don’t know, though I would venture it is less than a million OLPC’s, and more likely just a few hundred thousand.

I’m also extremely confident because of a property of open-source that I think only I and my fellow open-source developers fully appreciate.

If you read the earliest post in this blog you will find an account of a panel discussion I attended in February, 2006. It was part of the IT Academy, a program supported in part by IBM, intended to attract high school students to careers in technology, or to at least educate them about technology. Some of those students labor under great economic disadvantage.

One of my colleagues on the panel was an LTC colleague and Linux strategist. He noted that IBM estimates it takes about a billion dollars to create a new hardware platform. IBM has some experience in this area, including the creation of the BlueGene supercomputer and the Cell chips that power the gaming platforms of Microsoft and Sony.

But chips alone are of little value. They need software to do useful work.

The open-source community has been hard at work for over two decades to create that software, so that now there is a complete “stack” of solutions available in open-source form, ranging from the code to be found in a BIOS chip that is executed in the moments soon after a computer is turned on to bring it up as a useful platform, all the way of to the latest BlueGene/p supercomputers that are the fastest supercomputers in the world. [3]

All that code is available at no cost. It is there for the taking. It would cost several billion dollars to reproduce it, to write an equivalent software stack starting from scratch.

That is why I am so proud to have played a role in creating the current open-source stack. For over the last two decades part of the programming community has created a tool in the form of software that is worth several billion dollars.

I can think of no other community that has donated so much work of such quality to the world at large.

What do actors give back? Baseball players? The NFL and the New England Patriots? [4]

It is open-source programmers who give back.

I have written several posts that have explored the question, “What is open-source all about?”

Here is what I think it is all about to many of the developers who have written it, myself included.

Each of us does this as best we can, adding a line of code here, a patch there, starting some projects that succeed, others that fail, all the time trying to help each other out, and training newcomers in what it means to be a part of this community.

We also deal with a lot of crap, primarily by trying to clean up our code and help others clean up theirs. We also deal with all the nonsense from the media, the analysts [5], the software companies that actively oppose open-source and in at least one case have said that “open-source is a cancer.”

We also deal with disputes within our community: GPL versus Apache, how to revise the Linux scheduler, KDE or Gnome, vi or emacs, how to fend off the FUD sent our way by others, and all that.

We do all this happily, though it is often unrewarding, a nuisance, and a distraction from our real work, writing good code in the hope that others may find useful.

Why?

We know many people use open-source every day, often without even knowing it. That is nice, but it’s not the real reason.

We do it because every so often some people want to do something that may really help make the world a better place and they need software to help them.

We don’t know just what software they may need, so we write as much of it as we can.

I know some of those people. They include the people who are working on the Sahana Project, and the people who are help making Ubuntu our best shot yet at bringing Linux to the masses.

And, on rare occasions, though I trust these occasions will become more common in the years ahead as open-source gets better and better, we are reminded that it is worth every needless distraction, every bug that we had to fix, every minute we wasted reading Slashdot or lwn.net instead of coding, or twittering away, or even blogging.

We got our most recent reminder this past week. It was sent our way by the over 300 attendees at the K12 Open Minds Conference.

Almost all of them were educators. And, courtesy of the OLPC that Mako brought along, they got to see what we can do on their behalf.

Keep on coding — it does matter.

thanks,
dave

Notes:

1. “k12openminds07″ is the recommended tag for writing about this conference. Use it.

2. That is why I take such pride in that I have paid my own way since the end of my freshman year in college, beginning with my good fortune in securing a well-paying summer job at the Air Force Weapons Lab in Albuquerque.

3. I’ve managed proposals in both these areas in my job at IBM. That’s one reason I love it so. It gives unique insight into what IBM is doing in the open-source arena.

4. See Injury on the field — now to the commercial

5. I don’t include the Redmonker’s in this group. They understand open-source.

[First published as K12OpenMinds07: Trip Report on October 19, 2007, this post has a photograph of my first use of the XO laptop.]

I attended the first national conference on open-source and education, Open Minds 2007. It was held from October 9-11, 2007, in Indianapolis,Indiana.

I have already written several posts about my experiences at the conference and plan to write several more. This post, the Trip Report, contains the photos I took, and will serve as a a summary of my impressions.

My plan is to start with some of the photos, followed by a brief description. I apologize in that I haven’t yet fully identified all the people shown in the photos. I will attempt to fix that as I go along, and will also add some final thoughts after I have completed the more detailed posts on the people and projects that caught my attention.

“Mako”

Ben Mako Hill of MIT’s Media Lab. This was taken after his keynote speech that opened the conference. His OLPC can in the green box to his left.

OLPC Dispaying my Blog.

I went up to introduce myself to Mako after his fine speech. He offered to let my try his OLPC. It powered up and found the wireless connection quickly. I then was able to bring up my blog and my very first post, as evidence both that it worked and to demonstrate my interest in education and open-source.

Thin Client in Computer Lab Running Ubuntu

About twenty students from nearby high schools kindly traveled to the conference the first morning and made use of a computer lab that had been set up for them. It featured thin-clients running Ubuntu.

ASUS Eee Micro-laptop

ASUS was a sponsor of the conference and had a table demonstrating some of their products, notably their new Eee Micro-laptop. I mentioned to their rep that my posts about building one of their barebone machines had drawn many views; for example, a google search on “ASUS Terminator C1″ gives as the first hit the description of the machine in Newegg, and the second is my post on building the one I bought from Newegg.

The Eee is due out sometime in November and will cost about $270. I asked them to send me instructions on buying one when it was available.

Lunch

I had lunch the first day with Dr. Ray Spain and Dr. Chris Whitlow of the Warren Country School District. Ray is the Supertindent, Chris the CTO. Warren County is among the poorest counties in North Carolina, and thus also among the poorest counties in the country. Chris has been using open-source since 1995, and has worked with Ray for several years.

Ray is on the left. Next to him is Mr. Jim Hare, CTO of A.C.E.S, a small company in Detroit that is working on putting thin-client systems into large, poor, urban school districts. Next to Jim is Chris. I am on the right.

I will more about them, and I look forward to working with them going forward.

Dr. Suellen Reed,Supt. of the Indiana State Dept. of Education, Welcomes the Attendees

Dr. Reed gave a short, gracious speech in which she welcomed all the attendees, and spoke of Indiana’s commitment to using open-source to improve education.

Mike Huffman, Indiana State Dept. of Education

Mike Huffman and Laura Taylor (not pictured here) were the co-organizers of the conference. Both work for the Indiana State Dept. of Education.

Two Attendees From Japan

I noted many attendees from other countries, and asked Laura Taylor if she could put together a list of the countries represented. I have a card listing them. I think there were about twenty.

Attendees From Scandinavia

Group Photo

Wrap-up Session

There was a wrap-up session after the conference to review how it went and to make future plans. I had offered to give two of the attendees a ride to the airport, so I waited around until it was over.

I got them to smile by saying, “Ah, the Evil Axis of open-source educators.”

Final Moments

I took this picture a few minutes later, to capture the empty halls and the abandoned vendor tables. The one shown is ASUS’s. I took the conference signs that were in front of the door. The wrap-up session can be seen through the door.

[First published as David Pogue: Laptop With a Mission Widens Its Audience on October 5, 2007]

The Business Section of the NY Times for Thursday, October 5, 2007, was notable for containing two articles that are of great interest to the open-source community.

I have written about the first, Larry Magid’s article The Next Leap for Linux in my recent posts Larry Magid: The Next Leap for Linux and Why Ubuntu? The NY Times Picked It To Represent Linux, And Said Good Things About It..

The second — and in my view the much more important — article is by David Pogue, Laptop With a Mission Widens Its Audience, and is the subject of this post.

Mr. Pogue writes about what is known as OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), Laptop.org. His article begins as follows:

In November, you’ll be able to buy a new laptop that’s spillproof, rainproof, dustproof and drop-proof. It’s fanless, it’s silent and it weighs 3.2 pounds. One battery charge will power six hours of heavy activity, or 24 hours of reading. The laptop has a built-in video camera, microphone, memory-card slot, graphics tablet, game-pad controllers and a screen that rotates into a tablet configuration.

And this laptop will cost $200.

The computer, if you hadn’t already guessed, is the fabled “$100 laptop” that’s been igniting hype and controversy for three years. It’s an effort by One Laptop Per Child (laptop.org) to develop a very low-cost, high-potential, extremely rugged computer for the two billion educationally underserved children in poor countries.

The concept: if a machine is designed smartly enough, without the bloat of standard laptops, and sold in large enough quantities, the price can be brought way, way down. Maybe not down to $100, as O.L.P.C. originally hoped, but low enough for developing countries to afford millions of them — one per child.

The laptop is now called the XO, because if you turn the logo 90 degrees, it looks like a child.

The article later says (emphasis added) :

There’s no CD/DVD drive at all, no hard drive and only a 7.5-inch screen. The Linux operating system doesn’t run Microsoft Office, Photoshop or any other standard Mac or Windows programs. The membrane-sealed, spillproof keyboard is too small for touch-typing by an adult.

There you go, boys and girls. Though stated in a roundabout way, we learn that this marvel of hardware is even more marvelous in that it runs Linux. Yes, Linux, recalling to mind the famous scene in the movie Jurassic Park in which a twelve-year old girl says, in words that will always find their way to the heart of every programmer, dogs (and brothers-in-law) notwithstanding:

“This is a Unix system … I know this!” [1]

That’s right, OLPC runs Linux! We know this!

It was great to see this news reported in the Times, even though I have known for some time that OLPC would be based on Linux.

This is what I try to do in in this blog:

I know Linux, and I want you to get to know it — as best you can, and as best I can teach you — so you can then decide if it can be of assistance to you in your work or play.

Simply put, that is what we in the open-source community have had as our goal for well over two decades:

To give you options, and to educate you on how you may be able to use them to meet your needs, with no up-front cost required on your part as you explore these options and educate yourself about them with our assistance.

While we can provide the software at no cost, you still need hardware to run that software, and that is why OLPC is such an innovation, in that it significantly lowers to barrier to entry of exploring open-source options.

That is why I found the most important part of the article to be:

.L.P.C. slightly turned its strategy when it decided to offer the machine for sale to the public in the industrialized world — for a period of two weeks, in November. The program is called “Give 1, Get 1,” and it works like this. You pay $400 (www.xogiving.org). One XO laptop (and a tax deduction) comes to you by Christmas, and a second is sent to a student in a poor country.

This is why I have just visited www.xogiving.org and signed up to pay the $400.

First, to help someone whom I will never know.

Second, and this is much more important to me, so I can study my XO and then report to you on what I learned during that exploration.

Indeed, as best I can, I hope to provide some guidance in using it effectively and writing software to make it even more effective.

I can’t wait, though I know I must, but the anticipation of the journey will make it even more exciting once it actually begins.

Stay tuned.

I’ll keep you posted.

Notes:

1. While some purists have argued it really isn’t Linux, they don’t know a command line from the line at Belmont Race Track, and so will be dismissed from further consideration. It is Unixy enough for me. “Nuff said,” as I often read as a child when I was a rapt fan of the comic strip Snuffy Smith.