Yet more Ubuntu fallout including forks of their dead desktop and mobile platform, Libreboot wants to rejoin GNU, mobile Linux coming together, IoT standardisation and how to spread the word about FOSS on LNL 10.
News
Wayland and GNOME to be default in Ubuntu 17.10
Yunit tries to avoid a mutiny as UBports looks to have avoided theirs
Libreboot applies to rejoin GNU
Halium aims to standardise mobile Linux development
The open interop platform for the IoT edge; Cloudflare has their own IoT security solution
Entroware
This episode of Late Night Linux is sponsored by Entroware. They are a UK-based company who sells computers with Ubuntu and Ubuntu MATE preinstalled. They have configurable laptops, desktops and servers to suit a wide range of Linux users. Check them out and don’t forget to mention us at checkout if you buy one of their great machines.
How to talk to normals about FOSS
What’s the best way to introduce people to the idea of FOSS? Explain the practical benefits, go full on rms, or something in between?
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Meh, people are messy. Maybe when you get all parents, well the majority of parents, to implement their kids in a standardized way or at least one compatible to your standardized community…
I agree a new little fledgling project of a handful of people shouldn’t be too concerned about governance while still figuring out what they actually want.
And Jesse’s flowchart doesn’t sound too bad either to give some pointers to people.
Besides the Linux Foundation being the place where big companies’ forgotten toys, ehm, opensource projects go to die the OCF and the IoT thing might be useful if they build on top of each other like IP and HTTP.
But maybe this space still needs its IPX and AppleTalk and DECnet to figure out how to do networking properly.
Jesse, you may rather use Mate as an example for people’s option to take the code where they want it to go even when the original project has different plans.
I like to point out the collaborative aspect of the model, people working together to create something, be it useful or just for fun. But I’m afraid my main “contribution” in terms of FLOSS _advocacy_ is forcing *buntu*¹ upon student assistants nowadays. I don’t care if they prefer windows or macOS, the code they’ll be working on will run on Linux so that’s what they have to get used to 😛
¹) I don’t care about their choice of desktop env either – as long as it doesn’t cause breakage which still tends to end up to be something I have to fix 😛
I don’t think open source advocates should give up on mobile despite the failures. As joe has argued, mobile computing is the primary mode of computing now for the majority of the world, so we should keep trying to get a real open source option there. What makes me hopeful is that development on mobile hardware has slowed down. Phones from a couple years ago are good enough. I hope that this can possibly give outfits like Fairphone or Purism a chance to catch up and produce something that isn’t well behind what Apple and Google are selling.
I agree with Ikey about trying to catch the next wave, but that seems tough for an open source community effort vs. a big company. It seems like the next wave after mobile is intelligent assistance like Amazon’s Alexa and that ship has also sailed.
In terms of advocating FOSS I think the freedom approach is the best way to go, as I’m sure Felim will agree. You have almost total freedom with GNU/Linux, to the point of only paying the developers through monetary donations and/or contributing to the code if you want to, for most distributions at least. And then there’s the usability of Linux operating systems which, speaking from experience using Windows 8 and 10, is far superior and far more productive than closed source competitors, as well as the tinker-ability, security etc. of Linux distros.
I would love to see this brought to the mobile form factor as well in a big way but Ikey has a point with the ship having sailed already, which is a pity, and I can see why Shuttleworth decided to drop Unity and the phone stuff in favour of IoT and cloud. Still, there’s massive potential for Linux in the IoT space and I hope that potential is utilised.
I’d like to see LNL on Reddit.
My approach is to say there is an alternative to Windows, I tend to have the following points in mind, but will spend most of the my time talking about one or two of them depending on the person. it has chrome and firefox, it looks similar to Windows, but will take a getting used to. The laptop/PC will be faster, 90% of maleware is made for Windows, so this is a safer alternative, there is no itunes, but there are alternatives and I stress again and again, it is not Windows multiple times, since that is the bit it takes people to wrap there head around.
I tried to explain the whole thing foss to people but its an alien concept to most non-technical people. So I tend to use politician, bite size statements. For the laptop in my jobs canteen, windows 7 was very slow on old hardware and wouldn’t go online via the ethernet cable. To the owner I stressed fast, has chrome like you are used to, not windows. So far it has been used without any problems.
I’m afraid in a few years the malware writer’s attention will be evenly split between windows and android : /
Joe — Paddy was talking about Gab.ai. It is far more than a “right wing hangout” — people tired of Twitter’s relentless harvesting of personal data and bot infestation moved there to talk about many more things than politics: Linux programming, Ruby Development, etc. free from the annoyances of Twitter which is a debased platform — a non-trivial percentage of “users” are actually bots. There should be an alternative to Twitter which seems to have no profits, erratic revenue, a part-time CEO with questionable judgment, and no real plan other than a large company acquiring them (several have kicked the tires and declined to make offers). I would agree that Reddit is not a good place, not the least of which is the lamentable reign of noted grifter Ellen Pao has left the place predictably polarized and in disarray, with a rival Voat.co in place.
I would be leery of investing any significant resources/time into either Twitter or Reddit at this point. Given the near costless nature of switching to less intrusive and polarized and bot-infested alternative.
As far as phones go, I still think there is room for a Linux open source alternative. Android is a steaming hot mess to develop upon, with Java being a non-starter for any significant phone-based AI just as phones are being both connected enough and powerful enough on their own to offer significant AI help with augmented reality. A hypothetical might be a phone connected to glasses with an IR camera to offer a heads-up-display on a car windscreen of say, a dark and foggy roadway, or other low-visibility situations while driving. There is still manifestly quite a bit of room for AI and apps to do a lot of things with phones that would drive people to purchase an Open Source platform — if that platform has all the best apps people will flock to it.
The situation with iOS is good and bad: the tools are good compared to Android, but bad in that they require pricey Mac systems and Xcode. Manufacturers with money will want an alternative to Apple (which sucks out all the money in their ecosystem and constantly dumps suppliers after a few years) and Google — who are closing off their system and copying Apple in claiming more of the money pile. I agree with Ikey that standarization is the key; allowing developers to scale on a common platform with common tools and a well understood architecture to create really useful apps that people will pay a premium for because they do things like help you avoid a crash on a foggy road. Ubuntu Touch and Tizen and Firefox OS are probably not it — but Linux IS the Swiss Army Knife of OS’s, and there are a ton of developers familiar with it on the server side. Plus the Pi on the tinkering side.