Christopher Blizzard » 2007 » May

decent article on 60 minutes

Christopher Blizzard — Mon, 21 May 2007 02:25:46 +0000

Not a bad article, all in all. Bit of a personality piece on Nicholas and they used “geek” in the pejorative. But it sounds like they got most of the message. Except they missed the connection of why Intel’s tactics are dangerous to the project. By hiding the true costs of their laptops they are undermining the ability for a huge number of children to receive low cost laptops. Are they really going to dispense laptops at a $100-200 loss each to a billion kids? I think that’s the important question. Actually, ask an Intel shareholder if they would be willing to back that kind of action.

Holy crap, the comments on the CBS website are deeply ignorant. People are pissed that they can’t buy the laptops for the US. Compared to most of the world, the US does not have poor people. Not like that. The what about me attitude of most of the posts makes me very sad indeed.

welcome, richard!

Christopher Blizzard — Sun, 20 May 2007 18:47:44 +0000

The ever wonderful Richard Hughes is joining Red Hat as an intern for the summer. He’s only been here for a few days but he’s already totally rocking our suspend/resume infrastructure for Fedora 7 and fixing kernel problems on the x60 he has.

I’m looking forward to the day I can upgrade from the old x31 that I’m still using. Richard, just let me know when everything on that x60 works out of the box and I’ll try to get a celebratory purchase order. (I wonder if anyone in the history of the world has ever used the phrase “celebratory purchase order“. Doesn’t appear so.)

summary from the red hat summit

Christopher Blizzard — Tue, 15 May 2007 03:43:28 +0000

We announced a pile of things at the Red Hat Summit. Lots of confusing articles have been written. Lots of press releases have been sent out filled with warnings about forward looking statements. Maybe you just want the run down on all the things that happened. This is your simple cheat sheet. Here’s the list:

Red Hat announced a long term client strategy. Widely quoted out of context as “The Desktop Paradigm is Dead”, what we really mean is that we’re moving to a model where Red Hat and open source client technologies move to an online world. To a place where consumers are moving en masse, but operating systems have been slow to follow. We believe that most companies who sell operating systems today will be more interested in protecting their cash cows than moving to a model that enables new types of collaboration and communication. The time to move online is now, and the open source model gives us the flexibility we need to get out in front.

Red Hat will lead this effort. We’ve already been leading with our investments in Mugshot, One Laptop per Child and years of investments and leadership in GNOME and Linux. The base OS is ready. It’s time to start competing for real and bringing open source to a place where it can win.

Red Hat announced a new product: Red Hat Global Desktop. The Global Desktop product is a fully featured desktop based on the same code as the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop product. However, there are some significant differences in terms of the support and distribution model.

First, our main partner in building this product is Intel. Intel gives us the support we need in terms of open source drivers and the channel to make the product successful. We will be able to certify this product across a wide variety of products that Intel is building. This is thanks to the wonderful work that they have done upstream and made available to the entire open source community.

Second, the distribution model is different. This product will be available only as a pre-load to those vendors through the channel. It’s not something you’ll be able to download on a CD or DVD. This is largely due to the fact that we’ll be working with those vendors to make sure that they can support people on this product instead of us attempting to do that support ourselves. In this way Red Hat will be the back end support provider for all those folks in the channel, letting them add a lot of value along the way, and we can offer them a properly priced product that they can sell to customers who really want something like this.

Third, this product is targeted in its first round at so-called BRIC and/or Developing World countries. And it’s priced for those markets as well. We are keeping the door open to the developed world as well, but the demand seems to be coming from the rest of the world first where the opportunity is for new systems, not attempting to convert existing enterprise customers.

And Fourth, this product has a shorter life cycle to enable fast-paced innovation. Instead of being support for 7 years, like the rest of our RHEL products, this has a 2 year support life cycle. We got a lot of questions from the press along the lines of “if the desktop is dead, then why are you announcing a new desktop product?” The answer is that the Global Desktop product is a first step along the path to an online world. This is the direction that we’re going and we have to start somewhere. As most of the rest of the world comes online, we will be ready to meet them with something engaging and interesting, designed for a connected world.

In summary, this is about growing the Linux client market. This isn’t about trying to replace some small set of Windows desktops in the developed world or trying to line up a relatively small number of units through a US OEM. This is about getting out there where people will grow up on free and open source software and understand that it’s not just free-as-in-cheap, but is also better and empowering to how they lead their lives and run their businesses. It’s just the first step, but it’s an important one.

Red Hat announced a set of Microsoft-compatible fonts that are free to distribute. Called the Liberation Fonts these fonts solve one of the biggest problems we’ve had with building office-compatible software: the fonts never quite matched up. They are available under a very friendly license and should be in Fedora and RHEL shortly.

Red Hat announced Red Hat Exchange. This is a web site and a set of agreements with open source software vendors designed to give customers a great experience with deployment and support. You can download a single software build that includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux and everything else you need to deliver a solution based on that partner’s software for your business. If you have a problem, you contact Red Hat support and they will work with the vendor to help you solve your problem. One price, one download, one point of contact and growing the open source business ecosystem at the same time.

Red Hat announced support for Intel’s vPro initiative. Designed to make Windows machines more manageable by placing an operating system underneath Windows to deal with security, deployment and administration, VPro is likely to make a huge difference in the lives of IT people inside of large organizations who have to deal with the day to day headaches of managing workstations and protecting Windows from itself.

Red Hat will build a set of high performance drivers for Windows to take advantage of paravirtualization found in our products. Quietly mentioned in Brian’s keynote, we’ll be building a set of drivers so that Windows won’t suck when it’s running on a supported hypervisor. This will be something new for Red Hat to do, but something that people will really value.

Whew. That’s a long list. Any questions?

ati + open source

Christopher Blizzard — Wed, 09 May 2007 16:47:48 +0000

The ATI marketing guy on stage (Henri Richard) at the Red Hat Summit just committed to fixing the ATI problems with open source. To paraphrase “most people are worried about what they will lose…IP, etc…we’re worried about what we can … Continue reading →

red hat summit 2007

Christopher Blizzard — Wed, 09 May 2007 15:20:54 +0000

I’ll be in San Diego for the 2007 Red Hat Summit. Doing a talk on Wednesday about OLPC and doing a lot of press in between talks.

critical mass for mugshot

Christopher Blizzard — Fri, 04 May 2007 12:38:10 +0000

There’s a point at which a service on the web becomes fun and useful. With “social networking sites” it’s usually that point at which enough of your friends are using something it and it lets you connect in a unique way. If you’re into stalking old high school girl friends it’s facebook, or if you like telling people what you’ve having for breakfast it’s twitter or if you’re just into bizarro nearly soft core teen created web pages and obscure music then myspace is your drug of choice.

But for me, mugshot has gotten to that point. I think that it’s best illustrated by a screenshot of the stacker on my desktop:

What I really like about that image is that it shows all my friends chatting about the posts that people are making and some comments in the chat activity for the Red Hat Summit 2007 group. You can see the movie I’m getting from Netflix (and so can all my friends – and, no, I’ve never seen Shaun of the Dead) and there’s a bunch of other random stuff in there. The most common stuff in my stacker these days is from the I Can Has Cheezburger group because cats + macros are the lulz.

I think that they key to making mugshot more relevant to people is to start exporting all of the great stuff that people are making. If people are chatting about your web log post, why can’t it show up in your web blog? That wouldn’t be too hard to do and would bring a real “live” feeling to web log comments – something that doesn’t exist today. Also the vast majority of my friends use macs. We really really need a mac client. A couple of my friends have just set mugshot as their home page as it’s the only way they can get a constant feed of my lol-inducing links. Of course, it is open source through and through so someone could easily work on a mac client.

In any case, it certainly has reached critical mass for me. What’s your tipping point?

one laptop per child and open source

Christopher Blizzard — Thu, 03 May 2007 19:13:18 +0000

I’ve been quietly waiting for someone from OLPC to say something officially and it sounds like a quote has finally made it into an ars technica article:

According to Walter Bender, president of Software and Content at OLPC, there is no agreement in place between OLPC and Microsoft to offer XO laptops with any version of Windows. Bender also indicated that Microsoft has not contacted OLPC regarding its $3 software bundling program, nor have any governments requested that the XO be outfitted with Windows. In short, there is no existing collaboration between Microsoft and OLPC aimed at outfitting the XO laptop with Windows.

The relationship can be explained thusly: Microsoft has some XO machines. They are trying to get Windows working on it. Sometimes they show up and ask random hardware questions. The OLPC guys say “look at the code.” They go away again. Sometimes they brick machines (because they have to replace the awesome firmware we have with a poopy PC BIOS) and send them back to the office to get them unbricked. Sometimes they complain that the machine has hardware problems and we reply that it works fine here.

For once Microsoft is getting the reverse Linux laptop experience: little support and little documentation for the hardware. The result will be a platform that doesn’t include any of the really novel features that we’re building in, bad power management, no systems management via the firmware and apps that will randomly crash because they can’t fix the virtual memory problem in the same way we’re approaching it. A second class citizen, to be sure.

The commitment to open source and free software is still one of the main principals of the project. Learning requires the transparency that free and open source software provides.

fedora 7: it’s the community, stupid

Christopher Blizzard — Wed, 02 May 2007 17:51:49 +0000

Bryan pointed me at this very excited review about the upcoming Fedora 7. The neat thing is that he really gets why Fedora 7 is such an important release for us and also for the rest of the free and open source software community. The main feature of Fedora 7, aside from lots of new stuff that the community has been working on (wireless drivers, new GNOME, etc) this release is mostly about enabling the community to do cool stuff with Fedora and let the community get in the driver’s seat for the distribution. From building Fedora-based security USB keys to OLPC, we’re already living the flexibility that open tools and open community can provide.

Today in particular is a very important day to make this happen: it’s merge day. Today is the day when the former Fedora Core and Fedora Extras become a single community-driven and community-owned distribution: Fedora. Red Hat still plays a special role here as a contributor but anyone who cares about a piece of the technology stack and has the ability to participate can finally do so. Want to hack on the kernel? Join the list and do some hacking. Want to own a piece of the stack that you think that is under-managed by a member of the Red Hat team? Man up and join the team. Want to hack on the actual infrastructure that makes the fedora project go? (Sysadmin boxes, hack on cool tools for the whole community, etc?) Sign up.

We’re still focused on making sure that we do really good releases every six months with support for roughly a year and a half afterwards (the idea that we’re unsupported is a total lie, for the record) to make sure that the best and newest technology gets into people’s hands as soon as possible. And within the limits of our values and tools, the law and spirit of free software, making things that Just Work.

We’ve already done a good job of attracting awesome people to the project. Red Hat folks inside of the project are already outnumbered 3:1. Compared to old Red Hat-driven Fedora releases, the sheer number of packages that are lovingly maintained has grown from about a thousand source packages to over four thousand in a very short period of time. The project is undergoing tremendous growth.

On a personal note I have to say that I’m very excited about our future in the Fedora project. This is just the first step on the long path to build a free software distribution that’s community-driven and let everyone who is interested in showing up and making a difference the tools and place to do so.

job openings for olpc

Christopher Blizzard — Wed, 02 May 2007 15:02:44 +0000

Red Hat has a few job openings to work on the One Laptop per Child project:

Software Engineer II: This terrible job title is code for awesome engineer. We’re looking to build an update system for OLPC that isn’t the usual yum/rpm/deb/apt system and we need awesome strong CS-focused people to make it happen. There are two openings for this job, not one.

Program Manager: What is a program manager, you ask? This is a person who manages the process around the software development and release process. They make sure that bugs are being followed up on, improves communication both inside the team and handles messaging to other team members and helps hold people’s feet to the fire about what they should be working on. This is not an engineering position, but an engineering background helps. Other parts of this role include making sure that a QA and test groups are working together with the engineering folks to make sure that everything is ready to go.