Mugshot

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summary from the red hat summit

May 14, 2007 in Design, Fedora, Freedom, GNOME, Mugshot, OLPC, Red Hat | 15 comments

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?

critical mass for mugshot

May 4, 2007 in Fedora, Mugshot | 5 comments

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:

stacker screenshot

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?

the journal for one laptop

April 22, 2007 in Design, Fedora, Mugshot, OLPC | 9 comments

Bryan finally posted something about the Journal idea that he and Seth had been worked on way back when. We’re using a lot of these ideas for some of the basic interactions in OLPC. His mockup was rudimentary, as most initial mockups should be, but I thought it would be worth it to post one of Eben + Pentagram’s most recent mockups to give people a better sense of the direction we’re going.

Note the critical pieces that are included: the document itself, who you worked on it with, name and metadata in the form of tags and the ability to easily share it with other people. Also note that we’re using “Resume” instead of open. The idea here being that you can actually restart an activity in the context of the people that you were originally working with on the document. So it’s not just about about the “what” of the data but also the “who” and the “when” each of which is missing from our current desktop metaphors.

This is the one part of OLPC and Sugar that needs the most amount of work and is the highest risk. But it’s probably the most useful part of the entire user interface. Ever notice how any reasonably complex cell phone or embedded device includes a file manager? There’s one on the N800, there was one on my old cell phone and they were the most confusing things. What do you do with data when you have it? Where did it come from? How do you give it to someone else?

The Journal also solves a few other interesting problems for us. The first is backups. The laptops don’t have a lot of storage, so it’s important that backups are done on a regular basis. So how do you go find old stuff when you need to? In our case, because the journal is time based if you’re close to the server your old stuff can just “show up” in the journal. So backups become offline storage instead of being a huge copy of everything you have. (Of course, you can backup what’s on your machine too, but it’s just how you view your data that matters.)

The second problem is “what do you throw away?” When you’re running out of space on your machine you often get a warning that says “hey, you should delete something.” But what do you have that you can delete? The Journal makes it easy. You just delete old stuff that you haven’t starred as important. (The question of whether or not that’s done automatically is another question, but we’re flexible enough to go either way.) It also makes it possible to make trade-offs. That is, if you want to download this thing that’s 50MB in size you can say “OK, these are the 5 things that you will need to remove to make space – is that OK?” Simply adding time and a simple value (i.e. if it’s important) means you can make all kinds of value decisions on the things you carry around with you. That’s very difficult to do with a standard desktop model.

the power of a connected experience

December 5, 2006 in Mugshot | 8 comments

The Hat Rack
The Hat Rack

I want to echo Bryan’s comment about the way that he deals with images on his phone. Since I’ve started using mugshot and flickr and my phone together, the way that I use my phone has changed. It’s fun to use the camera. Before I would just take a picture and it would just sit there unused. Sure, I could txt it to someone else and maybe they could see it on their tiny little screens too but more often than not it lost its meaning.

I’ve encouraged my friends to start adding their flickr accounts to mugshot and now when they take pictures, I get a little popup that lets me see what they have uploaded and a chance to go see it. Also, I can comment on the images from the chat link on the bubble. It’s a great time. I feel suddenly connected to other people via their phones and online personalities. Sounds corny, but something has shifted for me. When Havoc talked about a “live social online experience” back at the Red Hat Summit it didn’t have the kind of impact actually using it on a day to day basis brings.

Also, I have to put this in here.

DEAR MUGSHOT TEAM,

PLEASE PUT TOGETHER A MAC CLIENT.  IT'S REALLY NEEDED TO SO
I CAN TALK TO ALL MY NON-GEEK FRIENDS.

LOVE,
CHRIS

how have people been using mugshot?

June 4, 2006 in Mugshot

It’s pretty cool to actually see people using mugshot in the real world and how they use it. People always end up using it for things you didn’t expect. Here are a few things I’ve observed:

Red Hat Summit 2006

I walked around the back of the audience during Eben’s talk and watched people playing with mugshot. First, someone sent out a BIO on Eben and everyone joined the chat. They chatted about the talk as it went on and then once it was done, they left. A purely topical chat, something that we don’t see except on forums on the web. Except that this was live.

Event Planning

There’s an Arlington, MA group. It was kind of neat to see someone send out a link and then talk about what who might go to it, previous years, etc. And then leave once it was over. There’s no IRC-Guilt where you feel like you should hang out in a channel once a discussion is over.

Neat stuff.

I’ll bet you don’t understand mugshot

June 1, 2006 in Mugshot, Red Hat | 5 comments

I taste confusion. Misunderstanding. Cats and dogs living together. Mass panic.

Bryan and Havoc both posted about Mugshot. But they talked a lot about the what and not so much about the why. Havoc touched on this during the speech that he gave during the opening keynote, but I haven’t seen it really reflected anywhere in posts or documents, so I thought I might take a stab at it. (The videos from the keynote are rumoured to be up next week, but I think that getting this out there before then is important.)

First, a caveat. I’m not on the mugshot team. However, I have had the chance to interact with Bryan and Havoc and spend time talking about the ideas and the rationale behind it. So I feel like I have a pretty good handle on it. It’s my hope that I can put a little context on Mugshot.

Most people seem to be asking “Wait, is this Red Hat? What are they doing, getting into this space? Aren’t they an enterprise company? What about the Linux Desktop? This doesn’t make any sense at all!” We’ve been accused of getting into the “social networking”, “web 2.0″, “competing with myspace” and all sorts of nonsense. I guess I can understand that. People want to frame their discussions in what they know and it’s easy to try and pigeonhole what we’re doing as “just the same as what someone else is doing” but that’s not the case.

Let’s take a long step back and talk about Red Hat for a moment. What do you think we stand for as a company? What do we think about? What drives us forward? Servicing enterprises? Linux? A great logo? Something else? As a company we’ve done a huge amount of soul searching on the topic. And two of the main themes that seem to permeate everything we do cross along two axes: freedom and collaboration.

Examples? We care about free software. Not just “you can get the source code” but “free as in freedom.” Yes, I might sound a little nutty, but we do actually care about these things. And we’ve learned to work with our customers in the same way we deal with the free software community. Transparancy, honesty, and with a strong commitment to making them successful. Freely exchaging ideas and experience. Working as partners. That’s collaboration.

Keep those ideas in mind for a moment.

Think about how many people use computers in the world. We know that there are millions of people who don’t use computers to run their businesses. Our friends. Our families. They use computers differently. They use them for fun. To play games, to chat with their friends, share photos with their family. For entertainment.

Our current model of Linux-for-the business works great. It makes a lot of money for us, and our shareholders. But there’s a vast number of people for whom it’s unlikely that we’ll reach through that mechanism. They care about different things. So what would happen if we, as Red Hat, decided to reach out to them? What would that look like? Remember what we care about. We care about working with others and we think that everyone should have a chance to enjoy the freedom that we do.

We know that just doing a better Linux isn’t enough. Asking my mom to give up everything that she uses might make me feel good (and maybe her, given some of her experiences with Windows) but maybe it’s not the best for her. And who says that Linux is the only possible expression of those values? Or the fastest or with the highest impact?

This is the roundabout way of explaining why Mugshot exists. It’s a project. An expriment and a chance to learn. Dabbling in new waters. A chance to really change the way that people use the web and interact with each other and make things a little bit more fun. And at the same time giving others the chance to experience the values that we live every day.