Showing headlines posted by keithcu

The Linux audio stack is mature now. What is needed now is a realization that your customers want Linux support. Note, the WINE support for Ableton Live is getting solid today, but it does have problems. On the latest Ubuntu, it installs and runs, which is a huge step forward, but it has some perf glitches (some things are very slow), and the audio doesn’t work. With Ableton supporting Linux directly, or via Wine, ideally both, these problems could easily and quickly get fixed. A free / GPL Ableton would be very nice, but a paid-for version of Ableton on Linux enables users to run a free OS, which is even better. Not supporting Linux is damaging to the freedom of Ableton’s customers. If everyone “hates” Microsoft, why isn’t their more support for the alternate? Microsoft continues to win because of the lack of vision or laziness of others.

Software patents are frequently in the technology news, a multi-billion dollar licensing model existing in parallel to the traditional ways people acquire technology. Very few patents are enforced, but those that are often result in the transfer of secret and large amounts of money — not connected to the amount of work required to create the invention, but to the thickness of the wallet of the defendant.

Sun’s first mistake with Java was locking up the codebase, letting few see it, and letting even fewer improve it, so that today, there exists only a small community of people, outside of Sun/Oracle, who understand and are improving the core.

Draft of an open letter to the LKML about faster Linux world domination. Hope people find it interesting and would appreciate feedback.

If we were already talking to our computers, etc. as we should be, I wouldn’t feel a need to write this to you. Given current rates of progress, Linux still seems a generation away from being the priceless piece of free software useful to every child and PhD. This army your kernel enables now has millions of people, but they are not working efficiently. My mail one year ago listed the biggest workitems, but I realize now I should have focused on one. In a sentence, I have discovered and “proved” that we need GC lingua franca(s).

If the WW II generation was The Greatest Generation, the baby boomers were The Worst. My former boss Bill Gates is a baby boomer. While he has the potential to do a lot for the world by giving away his money to other people, after studying Wikipedia and Linux, I see that the proprietary development model he adopted has greatly stifled the progress of technology his generation should have provided to us.

Future software advancements like cars that drive themselves will trigger a new perspective on whether we can build a space elevator, and in what timeframe.

I feel that all Ubuntu users, even the happy ones, who ever decide to contribute back should just directly join the Debian team. Ubuntu might not realize it, but it is best for everyone if all work is done in Debian first.

Futurists talk about the “Singularity”, the time when computational capacity will surpass the capacity of human intelligence. Ray Kurzweil predicts it will happen in 2045. The flaw with any date estimate, other than the fact that they are always prone to extreme error, is that our software today has no learning capacity, because the idea of continuous learning is not yet a part of the foundation. Even the learning capabilities of an ant would be useful.

Mark Shuttleworth and I have a forth and back on the Ubuntu / Debian relationship.

When I write about Debian and Ubuntu, I have focused mostly on the inefficiency of the separate teams.

I find it interesting that the idea of Linux on the desktop is responded to by either yawns or derision. I think it depends on whether you see Linux as a powerful operating system built by a million-man army, or one filled with bugs and missing the cool stuff like speech recognition.

It is much less expensive for hardware vendors to support Linux. If you want to build a device driver, a great place to start is by looking at existing shipping device drivers, an opportunity that Linux offers to everyone. A proprietary “Device Driver Toolkit” with its sample code is never as good as production code. Those expensive kits contain documentation, but not source code — so you sometimes have to guess at what is happening down below.

I have had this idea for a Virtual Darpa Grand Challenge for a couple of years now and I’m starting to shop it around to angel/venture capital people. But I thought I’d also put this out there to the Linux community and see what they think of it. I’ve never done anything like this before so I’m not even sure if I should take on this idea, but I’d be interested in hearing what people think of it and any advice on how to make it happen.

The last two releases of Ubuntu, 9.04 and 9.10 seem to generate a lot of complaints of bugs. The good news is that this is all very natural, and even to be expected given the deep changes that are being made to the stack. Bugs cannot be fixed until they are found, and they cannot be found until users are running the code. Ubuntu’s large user base means that it will find bugs not found by the upstream developers, which is mostly teams of just handfuls of people.

A lot of open source advocates like to rage against the machine at Microsoft, but when a former Microsoft Research employee says that Windows 7 won't stop Linux from market domination, that's an opinion to note. Keith Curtis, author of the book After the Software Wars, says just that. But he goes further. He thinks Microsoft and its customers would be better off if the company ditched Windows and instead built its own version of the Linux operating system.

It goes almost without saying that the release of Windows 7 is important for Microsoft to stem the tide of customer dissatisfaction with Vista, which has been extremely damaging to the Microsoft brand, and has caused it to lose users to both the Macintosh and Linux.

I have just finished a new book about free software. Excerpt: Given the technology that's already available, we should have cars that drive us around, in absolute safety, while we lounge in the back and sip champagne. All we need is a video camera on the roof, plugged into a PC, right? We have all the necessary hardware, and have had it for years, but don't yet have robot-driven cars because we don't have the software. This book explains how we can build better software and all get our own high-tech chauffeur.

I was honored to present my ideas about Ubuntu & Debian at Debconf 7, with a number of Ubuntu and Debian developers present, including Mark Shuttleworth and DPL Sam Hocevar.

I fear Debian could be left with mostly developers who are happily motivated with just packaging another piece of software. While there's nothing wrong with feeling that way and working on that basis, we don't want to lose the people who want to work on things that cut across sets of packages, like speeding up the boot time, improving the installation experience, making the distribution attractive for speakers of $language, making sure Debian supports as much hardware as best it can, porting Debian to interesting new architectures, integrating Xen and SE Linux with Debian, making a useful default desktop install, etc. [Ugliest blog evar, but makes some interesting points]

OAXTEPEC, MEXICO -- The 7th annual Debian Developers Conference (DebConf6) brought close to 300 Debian developers, package maintainers, and other interested parties to Mexico's government-owned Oaxtepec Vacational Center last week. [A long, but very interesting and important article.]