It really isn’t much of a big deal when you take into account that getting into an iPhone is still much more expensive than a phone running Android.  Many people are choosing Android because they either can’t afford or don’t want to spend the money required to own an Apple product.  It hardly determines a superior product.

Who cares why it’s happening, right?  We should just be cheering that open source is finally trampling a proprietary product on it’s own turf!

Wait just a sec, you robe wearing, GNU-touting supernerd.  During it’s incredible rocket to popularity and stardom, Android is showing the world one of the main reasons open source sucks. Although I’ve made fun of it countless times, it seems that people are still surprised by the fact that if you have 400 versions of one thing with no interoperability planned into them, you spend much of your time frustrated by the fact that applications written for version 394 isn’t compatible with version 103.  In short, many applications written for Motorola’s Android doesn’t work with LG’s version of Android.  For that reason, consumers are growing wary that the Jones’ version of Android will be better than their own.  Unlike Apple’s OS, inequality abounds.

I have bigger things to worry about than this, however.  I’m working on creating a distrowatch site for the Android operating system so each phone owner can track the top five hundred versions of Google’s operating system in real time.  Given the linux user’s inability to see this as a huge shortcoming, it should be incredibly popular.

I now understand that the fairies kick you in the teeth while you’re down, take your offering and leave.

A few years ago, I needed a testimonial script for a client.  I searched for over a month, finding absolutely nothing that was designed for testimonials.  I found tons of requests for them and I found some random quote generators that some people tried to pass off as a testimonial system to the tune of 20-40 bucks, but no actual testimonial system. So I wrote one.  During my writing of it, it became unnecessary for my needs, but I had this incredibly complex script that I hated to can.  I had two choices.  I could complete it and either offer it as a commercial script, making some pretty good change or I could selflessly pass it to the world for use at no charge and only a passing request at a donation on the download site.

I’m such a fucking idiot.

When I name my scripts, my only two requirements are that they are nonsensical and they bring up zero results on Google.  That second part is harder than you would think.  When I created the testimonial script, the search result for it’s name was zero.  Tonight, it stands at 54,439.  It surpasses every other testimonial script currently in existence, in regards to popularity.

So what did I get for my efforts through the donation system? Hold on to your seat.  Ready?

Five donations totaling $73.00.

For the hundreds of hours spent on the script both in development and support, I received just over a billing hour in payment.

Now, before you call me a heretic and blasphemer, let me explain.  My complaint isn’t with the amount of money.  I provided it free of charge expecting little in the way of recompense.  My issue is simply with the lack of appreciation shown by people that take something and us it for monetary gain, never once considering the author of the script that they’re using to do it.

I can’t count the number of open source scripts that I’ve used and subsequently donated to the author of. Am I the only one that feels like a complete piece of shit if I go around grabbing scripts and apps at no cost and then trying to make money with them?

If the numbers can be believed, I’m one of six.

The last time I had checked it, the thread had fallen short of it’s comedic potential but the seed had nevertheless been planted.  I got to contemplating the urge in people to split from an existing group or community only to create another group or community.  So there.  Neener, Neener.  The only difference is that you have no user base and you’re going to spend your time on your forum talking to yourself.

This doesn’t just happen in  social communities.  Open source software is world renown(and ridiculed) for this.  Don’t like the way Francisco Burzi handles the development of PHP-Nuke?  Well, just fork the development.  Ok, except hundreds of people did just that separately of each other.  The 10 or so that didn’t fail immediately all continued on while acting as if the others didn’t exist.  Some of the refusal to work together between the development teams were for reasons as small as simple coding methods.  All agreed that they could work together if the other team would change their development method.  Sometimes they would get together just long enough to have a fantastic falling out that ended in a reforking of the already forked project.

But wait there’s more examples to be had than just the soap opera style explosions of egos between small-change coders.  Let’s look at linux in general.  Have a look at the popularity page on Distrowatch.com.  It lists 300 flavors of linux on this page and tracks their popularity from day to day so you can see if your favorite brand of linux is more popular than it was yesterday. Only if it’s in the top 300 distros though. If your distro comes in at 301, you’re out of luck.

The top 300 operating systems.  Think about the scope of that. Windows offers you three distributions and if you go with a Mac, you can follow Henry Ford’s line of thinking, who said “Any customer can have a car painted any colour he wants so long as it is black.” Linux has so many that this particular fan site restricts it’s tracking to 300 distributions.  In spite of this, the linux zealots wonder why the operating system can’t be taken seriously by Joe Sixpack.  You can claim that there’s legitimate reasons for separate distributions and I would agree.  If, however you argue that there is a legitimate reason for hundreds of wrappers for the same linux, I would ask you if you had lost your bong while wandering through the blog. This openness is the greatest asset linux has.  The extent in which it is used is it’s greatest Achille’s heel.   God forbid we simply offer an application package for a particular flavor of *nx.  We should most definitely offer our own flavor so we can tailor it to people that collect bottle caps.  They deserve their own distribution of linux.

The very same mindset that makes people care what place their distro is in on the popularity page at Distrowatch.com is the one that causes people to fork scripts for no real reason and create competing forums when plenty already exist.  There’s an inflated sense of ego that people don’t know how to handle.  They’re incensed that something they hold important was deemed less important by others.  It never crosses their mind to simply move on to one of the millions of other forums out there, collaberate on a script in spite of minor differences or in the case of linux distros, just use one of the hundreds of freaking flavors at your disposal.

You’re all doing it wrong.

Unless your intention is to muddy the waters more than it already is, in which case you’re a griefer and you’re actually doing it right.

Well, you can now officially consider it another open source attempt that is being buried and forgotten.  I know, shocker.

Who would have thought that an open source endeavor such as this would have failed, what with the incredible success rate that these types of efforts enjoy?

I would be blogging this from my linux OLPC laptop, but, well, you know.

A member of one of the forums I frequent posted this article by Ken Starks of Helios.  He received an email from a middle school teacher.  It seems one of her children had brought a laptop into her classroom and was showing the other kids how linux worked and handing out disks.

Did she write Ken to find out what linux was?

No.

Did she write him to ask him if he could supply materials for her student?

Nope.

Did she ask him to talk to the child about running linux in the classroom as it was a disruption?

In the immortal words of Men at Work: Na, Na, Na.

She wrote him to tell him that what he was doing was wrong, making kids think you could get something for free when you couldn’t and that she wasn’t sure, but she thought he was doing something illegal.  If so, she was going to try to have him prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.  Finally, she suggested that Mr. Stark contact Microsoft to see if he could get some obsolete OS disks on the cheap for the computers he hands out to disadvantaged kids.

Well, Mr. Stark had some fun with it, it got picked up by Slashdot and she ended up looking like the tard that she is in front of the whole world.  Yay, public education.  The most disappointing aspect of the whole fiasco was the warm-fuzzy group hug that Mr. Stark perpetuated, to diffuse all of the linux zealot’s anger and resentment.

As I stated in the forum post concerning the letter, she shouldn’t be berated for not understanding linux.  It’s still an OS aimed at geeks(dispute this, and you’re a geek.).  What she should be ridiculed for is going so far as to accuse someone of illegal actions without doing an iota of research on the matter, aside, of course, from using linux once in college.

If you wonder how our kids turn out to have the thought capacity of turnips, you have to look no further than Karen, our children’s guardian through the learning process.

• Microsoft is everywhere
• you’re giving children false hope
• I saw a linux install 10 years ago
• I think you may be doing something illegal

All of these sentiments sent to an OS developer without taking the time to figure out what the hell he was developing.  I don’t know about you, but as a general rule, I require some form of information before I will accuse someone of anything.

I bet if I did the research, I would find that her students truly do have the thought capacity of turnips.  Since I haven’t though, I guess I shouldn’t say so.

Group hug, everybody.

Well, Openmoko released the second gen phone to five distributors in France, Germany and India.  If you’re wondering why the US hasn’t seen it, it’s because they’re embracing the markets that show an open mind.  I-Sheep need not apply.

What does this mean?  Well, unless you’re a nerd, chances are great that you won’t notice the subtle changes.  Further, if you do notice them, you won’t care.  But for those of us paying attention, this provides an alternative to the developers that lock you into proprietary hardware, software and contracts.  Where Apple releases updates simply to squash hacks that their users have created to make the hardware work the way they want it to(i.e. for them), the open model hands all the necessary information over and asks that you share your work if you come up with something cool or useful.  It’s a community that not only allows you to make your hardware work for you, it helps.

Maybe Mr. Wozniak should pick one up.

In what is standard operating procedure for Microsoft, they created multiple licenses with varying degrees of openness in them. None of them are actually open. That would be crazy. Just like with their Vista licenses, they were designed to cause confusion and lead the end user to into a position that they don’t actually want to find themselves in. Their shenanigans with the Vista licensing earned them a class action lawsuit. The same shenanigans with their open licensing earned them approval from the less observant open source community.

Before you write me off as another of the legion of Microsoft haters, let me just say that I’m a terrible FOSS disciple. I think Richard Stallman is one of the craziest people ever to don a robe and funny hat. In my humble opinion, the type of exposure that he generated hurt the acceptance of open software more than Microsoft ever could. In fact, I would say that they couldn’t have paid for better anti-FOSS exposure.

I don’t harbor any ill feelings towards Microsoft. You can’t be angry at them. Everyone has known the type of company that MS was from the very beginning when they bought their first OS. They don’t innovate. They take others’ innovations and make money off of them.

My frustration is pointed more towards the idiots heading the open source movement. From the very beginning, they have been the brunt of Microsoft’s attempts to destroy the open source movement in it’s entirity. Microsoft squashed the OEMs’ repeated attempts to install open operating systems from the factory. They funded SCO’s attempt to prove in court that they owned the Unix code found in every linux operating system. You name a dirty, underhanded and unethical method of squashing competition and I can probably show you record of it being used by Microsoft as part of their business model. In spite of this, the FOSS community continue pandering to Microsoft’s appeals to just try it one more time. They promise that this time they really do want to be part of the open source movement. You know, because it makes them so much money.

I guess the open community’s trust in Microsoft’s intentions has stemmed from Microsoft’s ambiguity towards their goal and beliefs. If only there were some way for the open community to know what kind of scoundrels they’re dealing with.