Short and blended well

Blender is one of those tools you hardly ever hear about, and when you do, everything about it seems unreal. Blender is an open source, cross-platform tool for rendering 3D objects. In other words, you can use Blender to produce fully immersive three dimensional worlds. And render them either as stills (photographs) or movies.

From time to time, Blender Foundation releases short movies that showcase the capabilities of this powerful open source software. The latest in the series is called Sintel. The foundation had earlier released two other short movies called Elephant’s Dream and Big Buck Bunny. Sintel is embedded next, and the other two are embedded after the break.

The Alternative Desktop

One of the biggest selling points for Open Source and/or Free software has been the alternative desktop -- an alternative to the Microsoft desktop. There has been a great gig and dance about how Open Source can replace Microsoft on the desktop. However it is something that has not materialized and might not in the near future too.

The problem with the statement "replacing the desktop" is that it is so vastly oversimplified. It is a statement that assumes the desktop to be a single monolithic entity, held hostage in a fortress, guarded by a dragon. But that is not the case, there is no single dragon that can be slain in order to own the desktop -- rather there are a variety of komodo dragons, dogs, falcons and lizards that guard different strong holds in the desktop. An understanding of the future of the desktop is in understanding the map of the desktop topology and the wars that are in the offing.

Office applications is the biggest fortress of all -- guarded by the fiercest of all dragons. Office applications - we are defining as text editor + spreadsheet + presentation. The second bastion is email + PIM client. The third biggest fortress is the browser -- and in particular the starting point of browsing, namely search. The next biggest war ground is the multimedia - this is less of a fortress and more of a live, action-filled battle ground. Then there are thousands of other forts, small and large, strewn all over the place.

For some reason Open source has decided to publicly attack the biggest and strongest of all fortresses - the Office applications. By choosing to replace word, maybe, FOSS has chewn more than it can swallow. The reason is simple. The fort is not only the best entrenched, but the dragon protecting it is desperate enough to do anything protect it. MS Office is very strongly entrenched with its users because of the hostages it carries - user data. There is a large amount of user data held inside the proprietary formats of Word, Excel and Powerpoint. People have written macros in Word and Excel that run business processes now. Everyone has their favourite powerpoint templates.

This fact is acknowledged by FOSS alternatives like Open Office and Star Office when they provide compatibility with Microsoft formats. However that is like dragging the donkey by its tail. Providing compatibility, allows existing users to afford continuing with their chosen FOSS option. It is not an incentive to get new users on board. And it is no reason to be an 'alternative'. A true alternative would have to be indistinguishable from MS Office with respect to file formats, macros etc. And any such option is no longer an "alternative" - it is the thing itself. The sheer gigantic wall of having to work with existing data makes FOSS options a non-starter in the Office applications part of the desktop.

Then we have email. Outlook, apart from its infamous record in security, has a major disadvantage working against it - SMTP. Outlook has to, whether it likes it or not, work with SMTP. And SMTP being an open protocol, alternatives are a lot more possible with Outlook. Further, with options like GMail, yahoo and hotmail it is possible to use email without even having a client. And data already existing with Outlook is also exportable and is only a one-time activity in almost all cases. The uniformity of existing data, medium dependency on tool, and an established existing open protocol makes email a good breeding ground for alternatives. Also given that corporates typically go for entereprise-wide implementations, any tool can be implemented across the organization, and provide the same rich set of functionality, without haveing to worry about breaking compatibility of those outside the organization. Inter-organizational data transfer happens using SMTP, which will continue uninterrupted.

The browser is the other major fortress, which is very vulnerable. By the very nature of the web, proprietary-ness is forced to marginalize itself. Formats are more or less open, accessible and available to user regardless of tool used. There is nothing other than the sheer laziness of users preventing a switch from existing browsers to a new browser and from there on to a third browser. The little data, such as bookmarks, that needs to be migrated is typically handled by the installables of the new tool that is replacing the old. The only barrier offered by the incumbent, IE, is the use of ActiveX. However given the stigma already attached to ActiveX, this is not completely insurmountable.

The next battleground is that of multimedia. The field here is data heavy. However this is also the land of the DRMs, restrictions, proprietary standards, incompatibility, RIAA and lawsuits. This is as yet undefined a field, with everyone desperate to corner a pie for themselves. There are fundamental questions about the existence of multimedia on the desktop that have not been answered.

That brief survey over, it is time to look at where the alternative is going to come from. The current Office-focussed FOSS methodology does not look very promising. They seem to be answering a question alright, but it is starting to look like it is the wrong question they are grappling with. The Google approach on the other hand is a lot more viable. Rather than take on the biggest bastion on the desktop, they are going for the rest of them. And rather than seek to replace any of them, they are building powerful allies, making friends, offering services and building a base that they can trigger at any time to provide a true "alternative" on the desktop.

Google is uniquely poised today. On the web, the majority of users start from its pages. It has acknowledged that search is something everyone wants - so it is searching for everyone - news, ecommerce, images and even user harddisks. They are quietly getting into corporations, with their ubiquitous search button. They are aligning themselves with all the new technologies on the web -- keyhole, blogger -- all with a view to providing users the ability to search on it. They are one of the biggest buzz words on the email scene with their touted GMail. They are browser independant and have quiet links with the challengers to IE. When multimedia wars settle into some semblance of order, Google will be there, searching away, pointing people to the multimedia they need. And most importantly, they have shown themselves to be quite unmoved by the existence of MS Office.

It is this wide footprint and their reluctance to touch the word processor that is uniquely equipping Google. In the coming years, Google will be all over the place, either directly or by buying companies out. And when it decides to, it will be in the perfect position to push for the "alternate desktop" -- a desktop that will enable users to do everything they want to do except perhaps create documents. How will this "desktop" look like -- I dont know. But knowing Google, they'll think up of something simply awesome.

Heres to the Googletop
-- ravi

The Philosophy of the Free & Open

And how it impacts us.

Open Source, is not about Linux. It is not about Apache ^[1], mySQL ^[2] or GNOME ^[3]. In fact, it is not about software at all. Rather it is a philosophy and a belief. A belief that is not only old, but is rather clichéd and goes – “The pen is mightier than the sword”.

The Internet has breathed a new life into this saying, granting it an awesome power. Power enough, that a few individuals, scattered across vast distances, armed with nothing but knowledge, are now planning world-domination.

This article is an idle walk down the annals of history and the corridors of philosophy ^[4], to play with the questions “who” and “why”. Who are these people, and why-o-why are they doing what they are doing.

Free as in Freedom

The words “free software” or “open source” typically evoke responses saying, “It is available without charge”. While true, it is a quirk with the English language ^[5] that prevents us from seeing the other, truer meaning. English uses the same word “free” to denote both “without a price to pay” and “freedom to do what you wish to do”. It is the second meaning that truly symbolizes all that this movement stands for. The interpretation of this freedom makes one appreciate that this philosophy is not restricted to software at all. It in fact extends a lot wider.

Imagine a bunch of kids given a huge white canvas, spotlessly clean, and spray cans of red paint. More often than not, the kids will spray away, randomly on the canvas. What if, instead, the kids sat down and started to painstakingly detail the verses of the Iliad or the Ramayana. This is seemingly inconceivable, because of the apparent human nature of preferring the playful to the ordered, which is amplified to an extreme in a group. Directing a random group without either a stick or a carrot seems impossible.

However this impossibility is precisely what is manifesting over at Wikipedia ^[6]. Wikipedia is an “Open Encyclopedia” where anyone can contribute to any article, without even being logged in. Furthermore, any change perpetrated is visible instantly on the web, without being checked, corrected or in any other fashion moderated by anyone. Given this absolute freedom you would assume chaos – errors in content, clumsiness, information biases, ineptitude or plain vanilla vandalism. However the Wikipedia is one of the web’s most searched encyclopedias, channeling the expertise of thousands to millions more.

Slashdot ^[7] is another example of this channeled freedom. Despite its obvious biases and pedigree, it remains by far the best example of a publicly moderated discussion board.

The philosophy that drives a hacker of Linux is the same that drives a contributor in Wikipedia. Freedom is not always a bad thing. It does not always result in chaos but begets responsibility and motivates productivity. This freedom is a core tenet of the philosophy of the Open Source movement. I could go on with other examples of the newsgroups ^[8] or the open courseware ^[9], but that would be unnecessary. Instead lets spend time tracing the roots of the free and open source philosophy.

In the beginning was the command line

With apologies to Neil Stephenson ^[10], we are talking about a time that was not too long ago. About three decades ago, the computer meant the PDP-10 ^[11] or a teletype-fed mainframe. Programming was about thinking in bits and bytes, while programs were meant to be shared, understood, debated upon and improved. Out of thin air and using 0s and 1s, a new science was being invented. C and C++ ^[12] were being developed, Unix was being coded ^[13] and software and hardware standards were being set.

The times were reminiscent of the Wild West; with its own tight knit groups, raw excitement and brave gun-wielding heroes. The difference was that the program now replaced the gun and the mainframe was the battlefield. It was this arena that the corporation was presently entering. With a promise to take computing to the masses companies were doing something that was unacceptable to the pioneers – “selling” software.

Richard Stallman ^[14] was an early pioneer. He believed that software was a universal tool and the source was its soul. Closing source or selling software was something that was utterly unacceptable to him. And he was prepared to do something about it. In 1984, the same year Apple Computer released the Macintosh, Stallman set up the GNU foundation ^[15].

GNU stands for GNU’s Not Unix, whose vision, satirically, was to provide a full, free version of UNIX. In 1984, UNIX was the predominant OS and was available in a mind-boggling variety of commercial flavors each fragmented from and incompatible with another. The Personal Computer as a product was almost non-existent then and as a concept was still a joke. GNU therefore sought to “liberate” the entire computing world by providing the fundamental tool – the Unix OS – for free.

UNIX-like operating systems are built of two basic parts – the kernel and the utilities. The kernel is the core, which handles the very low level interactions with the hardware, memory and the processor. It only provides a very basic functionality that is converted into something useful by the utilities. UNIX, by its rich heritage has a multitude of tools for every activity from network management to text processing.

While some members of the GNU started recreating the rich toolset, others started work on the kernel, called the HURD ^[16]. In time the tools started rolling out, each free, available with the source, providing functionality similar to or better than those provided by the various commercial Unices. The development of the kernel was however heading nowhere. The late 1980’s saw the advent ^[17] of the true Personal Computer – cheap Intel hardware running DOS or the early Windows.

Without the kernel, and a rapidly dying breed of mainframes unable to survive the onslaught of the PC, the GNU movement suddenly faced irrelevance.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Helsinki, decided that his personal operating system, Minix, a Unix-look-alike was not good enough. He was pretty sure he could write something better and attempted to code his own. But in doing this he turned to the Internet for help and guidance ^[18]. He also put the source code of his attempts back on the net for comments and correction. And from this sprang the kernel, which we now know as Linux. Linux as a kernel could run on the same contemporary hardware used by DOS and Windows. Further, being based on the same standard as that of the older UNIX, Linux could run programs written for the older UNIX kernels.

For GNU, this meant that their long wait for a free kernel was finally over. For Linux this meant that it finally had programs that could actually utilize the kernel that was being built. GNU/Linux became the complete ‘free’ operating system that Richard Stallman and a number of others had been dreaming of.

On the shoulders of Giants

It is people who ultimately define the success of any idea. So it is with the idea of the “open”. Among the multitude of programmers, users, fans and followers of the free and open source movements, there are some who have helped define the soul of the FOSS movement. There are some like Richard Stallman, who are fanatically devoted to the idea of free software, while others like Linus Torvalds, have been the silent, media-shy icons of the movement. There however are others who have helped give a more balanced view of the philosophy of FOSS.

Eric S. Raymond is a Linux evangelist and the author of three extremely powerful essays ^[19] on the philosophy of Free and Open Source. Called “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, “Homesteading the Noosphere” and “The Magic Cauldron”, these essays present a very logical account of the FOSS philosophy. These essays discuss the social, economic and personal drives, reasons and justifications for the success of the open approach. Bruce Perens is another Linux advocate whose article “The Open Source Definition” ^[20] is a fundamental account of the principle of the FOSS camp. These essays explore the novel effect of having a loosely bound; part time volunteers drive projects of unimaginable magnitude and give it all away for free.

One notable side effect of the having such a diverse and widespread fan base is that villains are instantly vilified and secrets don’t remain secret for long. Take the example of the famous “Halloween Documents” ^[21].

Microsoft, during Halloween 1998, commissioned an internal strategy memorandum on its responses to the Linux/Open Source Phenomenon. Unfortunately, it leaked, and within days was all over the Internet being taken apart by numerous FOSS advocates. Microsoft was always acknowledged to be the directly affected party because of the FOSS, but it was till then more of a cold war. The Halloween documents changed all that. Open Source advocates openly condemned Microsoft. Microsoft slowly started realizing that FOSS was rapidly changing from being a fringe movement to something that directly threatened it. It responded by sowing, what is now known as, FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) in the minds of its customers. For the first time Microsoft directly acknowledged ^[22] that Linux had the capacity to unseat it, and started attacking the fundamental value propositions ^[23] of Linux and the FOSS.

It is also about this time that the mainstream press started increasing its coverage of the FOSS. The coverage was initially about Linux, the free replacement of Unix. Then it was about the sustainability of the Open Source as a Business model. And lately it is about David Vs Goliath – FOSS Vs Microsoft.

The press is an expression of popular opinion. Complementally the press forms popular opinion. And the popular opinion, therefore, weighs heavily on portraying FOSS as the David in the David Vs Goliath story.

This is where we come in

As long as we restrict our view of the FOSS movement to the software it generates, this popular opinion would seem perfectly reasonable. However if we realize that the philosophy of FOSS extends beyond the mere products of the FOSS movement, we begin to realize the nature of our relationship with it. Without too great a risk of generalization, the true nature of the spirit and philosophy of the FOSS is nothing short of the Internet itself.

The philosophy if FOSS is about freedom, freedom defined as “libre” – lack of constraints. It is a spirit of sharing and collaboration. It is a spirit that places quality above other considerations. It is a spirits that drives and is driven by a free flow of ideas. It is a philosophy that considers information supreme.

Every time we search the Internet for tips we are appealing to the philosophy of Open Source. Every code snippet, article, comparative analysis, forum on the Internet is driven by this philosophy. Every self-taught computer user is a product of the philosophy of the Open Source.

To consider this movement and the change it entails as anything less than mammoth would be childish. It involves a fundamental shift in our perception of the business of Information Technology itself. However, the change is upon us. It is now up to us to either respond proactively or to passively let events take the lead in changing us.

References

[1] http://www.apache.org/
[2] http://www.mysql.com/
[3] http://www.gnome.org/
[4] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html
[5] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html#FreeSoftware
[6] http://www.wikipedia.org/
[7] http://slashdot.org/
[8] http://groups.google.com/
[9] http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
[10] http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10
[12] http://www.research.att.com/~bs/C++.html
[13] http://www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/
[14] http://www.stallman.org/
[15] http://www.gnu.org/
[16] http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html
[17] http://www.geocities.com/n_ravikiran/write008.htm
[18] http://www.geocities.com/n_ravikiran/write003a.htm
[19] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
[20] http://perens.com/Articles/OSD.html
[21] http://www.opensource.org/halloween/
[22] http://news.com.com/2100-1001_3-253320.html
[23] http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/facts/default.asp

Document Changes
November, 22, 2004: First published version.

Careful what you wish for...

A very popular line of thought in the FOSS camp is that we desperately need a shot of the corporate for true success - a successful business based on FOSS, a successful business partner, a corporate contributor, a successful corporate desktop. A favourite pastime for moderates and arm-chair supporters in the FOSS camp is to smugly wallow in the success of products, services, initiatives and companies that depend on the FOSS output.

I used to do the same too, but, I believe it is now time to review this mentality. For now we are faced with the grave danger of having the voice FOSS hijacked - by the corporate PR team.

FOSS and products like Linux have been coming of age. Common people, unlike the ones that read slashdot, are beginning to situp and take notice. The media has now stopped making moving pieces on FOSS and Linux and has started 'reporting' news in the same breath as IBM and Microsoft. FOSS is moving out of being a news worthy oddity to plain vanilla news.

But where do the news crews get their news from? When the common man and the common editor did not understand FOSS and Linux, the reporters who wrote needed to "understand" the phenomena for themselves and then report. But now everyone understands it, and all they need is quotes. And these quotes will now come from someone who has "credibility" with popular press - the corporate entities.

RedHat will now be a bigger "authority" on Linux than Torvalds. IBM will "understand" usability better than Ximian. Sun's views on Linux will will be "expert" views. And then Google will start spilling out sponsored links for searches related to FOSS.

And this is the next big hurdle that the FOSS camp will have to overcome - to gain a media prescence, a credible link to the world and not lose its voice to its corporate cousins.

This is bigger than any of the problems faced by Open Source and Free Software today - bigger than Microsoft or SCO. If a company makes an irresponsible remark, then the company will labour to correct it, because it will directly be affected by it. But with FOSS, as usual, you have new problems, unheard of before. Companies will now be free to make comments today, but there will be no one to retract those comments. Bruce Perens may counter SCO today; but how long and who all can be countered this way.

How can we go about giving FOSS a voice of its own?

- ravikiran n.

Time passes

Yeah, it does. Coz the last time I wrote that last thing, called woot, I was a student. Sitting away, tucked in some obscure corner of the world, in a place called Calcutta, having absolutely nothing to do, and no one to think about but myself.
Now, I am sitting far away.

Really far away. Farther than the biggest stretch of my imagination.
I am in Bangkok right now. In the JW Marriott hotel. In one of their biggest conference rooms. Listening to yet another talk about something that I had spent a lot of time learning about. This is strange. Once upon a time, I spent money and time to learn all this. Now I am being paid to sit through this class, and I don't even need it. Life does come a complete circle.

Oh, I have a laptop now. But yeah, it is not mine. Not loaned, but kind of owned corporately. And this is from the corporate network. So don't really know if people will be happy with this. But then, I frankly believe that this is a better utilization of my time as opposed to trying to listen to the class today. There is nothing to listen to.

As I was telling you, I have this laptop now. And the moment I got it, I wanted to move from my desktop to this. Which essentially meant that I wanted to install all the programs I had in my old desktop onto this machine and move over all my data files to this machine.

Then I got the shock of my life. They told me that all I could use was the core-load software. Nice term that - core load. But that really put the shackles on me. I could understand it in a way. They did not want any pirated software on the computer. Made sense. Obviously corporates dont really want to have pirated stuff on their assets, coz it might turn out to be painful for them in the future. Completely understandable.

Then I wanted to install at least my open source software on it. My openoffice.org for example, so that I could at least edit my stuff in that format. The answer to my astonishment was "no". I was not allowed to load any of this software at all. All I could use was the MS products, for which I had licenses via the corporate route and nothing else.

No shareware, probably makes sense. Coz there might be license issues.

Unnecessary small testing of programs also makes sense. Coz there might be an security and malware issues.

But what does not make sense is why no OOo? Is OOo not different from a free mario clone on the web?

Dont corporates distinguish between them?

What if I had a problem with the machine and I could just use a free software off the web and set it right? Can I not do it?

How does corporate handle different kinds of software. Is it always this fearful and afraid of non MS products? Or probably something which they had not paid for?

When will open products get corporate acceptability?

Gawd only help me find those answers. Or mebbe slashdot can...

sweet lord

~!nrk

Source Perfect

I was reading this article and its prequel that was posted on /. As the title of the story suggested, the author makes a point that all software source should be open. That is, programs should not be sold without bundling the source that was used to produce it. The point he is trying to make is that, just as buildings and bridges do not hide what they bring along with them, so should software not hide what it was built from. He does advocate crippled source to make sure that people dont recompile and all that, but that idea still being that only by making source open can one actually make sure that people dont write sloppy code.

I like that idea. As in the point that source should be open to make sure that programmers do their work properly, and dont hide behind the compiler for producing bad code. But the idea as he has presented is not, according to me, viable. The reasons are simple.

1. The analogy between buildings and software is not correct and does not hold. Firstly since seeing a building or a bridge is not the same as seeing a source. The analogy is more like blueprint and building. Secondly, what one can do with source, one cannot do with a blueprint - like reusing a part of it, copying it ad-infinitum and so on.
2. Even if we do make it open, who is going to check it? How qualified is he going to be to have to see source that does not compile and tell you if it is good code or bad? When was the last time you saw source code and judged it?

But coming to back to what I was saying. I do find myself agreeing with that fact that source should be made available. Only then can we get some sort of responsibility as far as building source is concerned. And this is a major flaw in the entire process of software building which i believe is fundamentally creating problems with the software (read IT) world. So this is what I suggest. What should rather be done is that we should have some sort of third party certification. Just like html is checked for adherence to standards, code should also be checked for adherence to standards. And companies should be able to proclaim that their software is "Source Perfect". I dont really know if we have such an idea lying around, but this sure is worth trying.

Of course, this has its drawbacks. The standards that need to be checked adherence to. That is the need of the hour. We need to define what good software is. Everyone knows the properties of good software. We should be able to standardise that and make it platform, implementation independant. Then we can be on the first step towards building a world having software that is "Source Perfect".

We had a recent meeting, for some work. There we were meeting these alumni, who were 25 years down the line. I was making a presentation to them, and said "And that is the reason I think I can safely say that we might be having one of the the best websites in the world". To which the answer was "That is precisely the problem with you new generation. Have faith. Say 'Ours _is_ the best website in the world'"

Amen to that

~!nrk