Colin Charles Agenda

The Debian folk are now bickering over whether their non-free software archive should exist, or whether folks need to add them by themselves. Joey Hess wrote up his thoughts on why he voted against keeping non-free around.

Which got me thinking. Currently, The Fedora Project has got a set of objectives that promotes the fact that we build the system exclusively from open source software. Then you’d think of using either Fedora Extras or Alternatives right?

But even there, in the terminology it states that we use open source software. As long as we realise that after the mega-merger of all 3rd party RPM sites, sites like Dag’s and even the macromedia sites stay alive. We can preach open source software, but the other archives offering not-so-open source software, must still exist.

So clearly, since Red Hat will host Fedora Extras soon, non-free stuff will have to be in Fedora Alternatives, no?

Everyone knows that Gartner’s take is usually very Microsoft oriented, right? The limitation from the Microsoft offering of a localised version seems to be there, and the heavily negative statement saying that people will get the Linux version, and pay USD$8 for a pirated copy. Tsk tsk. Then they’ll lose their 2-free days of training, and won’t be able to get support.

OK, my response might be a bit biased, but it’s because this is something dear to me – it should also be dear to the OSS community, with Fedora, Gnome, and OOo being key players here.

Reading the recent Computimes article by Sharifah Kasim (google’s cache) I think it’s time some doubts be cleared. In terms of why OdaSaja failed, and this (hopefully) succeeds, is the fact that PCs are available now at under RM1,000 – it’s an open market, and the cost comes out of each and everyone’s pockets.

Keeping the user experience enjoyable, and with minimum gripe, of course the open source software we give them will be well implemented and customised. If they think its a gaming rig, think again – 128MB worth of RAM, and a tiny amount of video RAM ain’t getting you far. But for the Net, office stuff, and so on, Linux cuts it.

And not to make any ad hominem attacks against Dr. Norbik, but he’s on crack when he comments on anything above RM1,000 is big spending for rural folk. He wants the Microsoft bit to be under 1k (while the open source one to be RM850). Does he even know the costs behind the hardware? Besides, keeping the FLOSS version under-1k is the idea – more people take it.

After sales support comes from support centres – 55 in fact. All nicely paid for by a company with too much money. A touch on maintenance can be provided at the 2-day free training sessions on getting up to speed with your new computer. If you screw the hardware up, thats what resellers are for – I don’t know how that’s being handeld though. And if you find Linux all the more interesting, or want to basically “just rock”, go further your knowledge and pressure companies to give cheaper rates (look at atSC or training.org.my for more, paid up training).

Funny to note that MS Works 2004 comes with Encarta (which runs dog slow!). With the Internet, who needs encyclopedias? /me looks at his dusting copy of Encarta ’95 And if Sun is offering Linux cluster support, it could’ve been done just nicely if they hired competent sysadmins – in Malaysia, we look at other agendas sometimes, don’t we?

Hey, forgot to mention it earlier, but planes run Windows it seems. My flight was delayed, and finally when it decided to take off, they admitted to having computer difficulties. The Airshow kept on crashing and rebooting, it was not even funny. I saw something.exe crash – the .exe bit made everything all that more interesting. I just feel a whole lot less safer flying nowadays… imagine Windows crashing, and not rebooting? Anyone know what the planes *really* run?

Lot’s of work to do. More interesting training notes to come out, under a nice open license, similar to my OOo training notes. Fedora Core 2, Gnome 2.6, OOo 1.1.1 – are my main concerns. And of course, getting the images ready for roll-out. Thoughts on a backup system, like those laptops that come with recovery partitions – can we do that on Linux? Like getting System Imager to “restore” stuff from a “hidden” partition?

Oh, policy time. Policy is being written by many folks, not even convinced of the open source movement. These are folk still running Microsoft-ware for their day-to-day work, e-mail client (the famous Outlook) included. My faith in policy just took a turn for the worse…

The PC Gemilang meeting thing happened. Discussing support, training, roll-out plans, and so on. I had a little agenda written up, and by the time a couple of hours was over, things seem a lot clearer now.

Microsoft is offering free training, with their marketing dollars (or ringgit). Microsoft is however, not offering media – these machines that go out with RM149 Windows XP Home (Malay edition aka XP-Lite) and Works 2004 Suite will be images that are pushed out on disks. If a virus eats up your system, take it back for support. Seems a little arcane to me, no? And since we can’t touch the images, we can’t install a more usable browser like Mozilla or a full-featured office app like OpenOffice.org on Windows.

Novell, with their recent acquisition of SuSe and Ximian are making inroads in Malaysia too. They tried for the PC Gemilang campaign, and failed due to cost reasons; now two colleges/unis are getting on the bandwagon. And even Sun’s coming up with “pricing for the people” with their JDS. There’s an advantage of support here. If Red Hat rests on their laurels, they’re going to lose a large market here.

For this to succeed, we need support from the other manufacturers in the Malaysian market – Dell, HP, and so on. Red Hat should look at the roll-out of Fedora and support it to some degree – because an additional 400,000 could be RHEL, no? Imran has a nice rant on the entire project.