linux

I'm sick of Linux being treated like a second class citizen. Hardware and software vendors alike almost proudly display “Supported for PC and Mac” tag lines. Technically, that doesn't even make sense, because both Windows and OS X can now run on pretty much the same hardware. And so can Linux. Even from a market share stand point, I can understand vendors' desires to advertise out of the box Windows support, but the market share of OS X is not substantially greater than that of Linux (specially if you put together all the different distributions).

But most importantly, I think it just being mean to the open source community. Consider the recent Safari announcement. Now it is well known that Safari is based on WebKit which has its roots in KHTML, the HTML renderer originally developed by the KDE community. To its credit, Apple has showed its interest in giving back to the community and WebKit and KHTML developers are collaborating to share their innovations.

But then why does Apple release Safari for Windows and Mac only? WebKit works fine on all platforms (both with GTK and QT) so there's really no good reason. For that matter, what about iTunes? Why isn't there an iTunes equivalent for Linux from Apple itself? Why does it want to alienate so many iPod and iPhone users who have Linux on their desktop? What about keyboards and wireless mice? Or monitors and hard drives and webcams and tablets and microphones? Or any number of the zillions of peripherals out there.

If you read the news, there is no dearth of evidence that open source in general, and Linux in particular, is impacting our daily lives more than ever before. Even if you don't realize it. From embedded systems to mission critical systems, from enterprise systems to the OLPC, from news papers to television stations, Linux and open source are every where. For a comprehensive in-depth article and lots of numbers backing these claims, I highly recommend this article by David Wheeler. How long will we have to wait before vendors finally accept that this is a customer base that they can NOT afford to ignore? How long will the community will have to keep proving itself over and over again that it is NOT a bunch of nerdy hobbyists who have no connection with reality?

Update: Here are some more resources on Linux/open source usage:

• Linux in business: business by categories
• Companies using Linux
• Lots of news about Linux on the desktop: several big vendors like Dell and Lenovo now sell laptops and desktops pre-installed with Linux

Just finished reading World Domination 201 by ESR and Rob Landley. Its an OK read. They make a good case, but it didn't come across as urgent and compelling as probably they intended it to. But most catalysts of change tend to be a little extreme, so I actually like the way the article has been written. It remains to be seen how much traction can it generate.

Gone are the days when getting webcams to work under Linux was a distant dream. Until recently I was myself under the illusion that very few (if any) webcams work under Linux and even if they do, what good would they be since I wouldn't be able to use them with Yahoo or MSN or NetMeeting.

Take a look at the list of supported webcams here. And this is just using one driver. Several Philips and Logitech webcams are supported using the pwc and qc (alternative) drivers. I just noticed yesterday that my two years old Creative Webcam NX-Pro was also supported by the spca5xx driver. Excited, I got home and plugged the webcam in and voila! It just worked ™!

I then went on the test the webcam with camorama, Ekiga, Wengophone-NG and of course, my beloved Kopete. Infact, I was even able to broadcast my webcam on Yahoo using Kopete! Suh-weet!

Readers who are going “so whats the big deal, we've been doing this in Windows for years” must realize that all this has happen without any (or little) cooperation from the vendors and manufacturers. This is reverse engineering at its best. Imagine how good desktop linux can be once vendors start endoring and supporting products the way they release drivers for PC and Mac.

So if you have a webcam lying around and you wished it worked on Linux, give it a spin. In all probability, it just will