25. Whereto?

I can already feel the trollers anxious to throw with accusations of FUD. Not facing the truth and not accepting critiques would be prejudicial to FLOSS at large.

Narrow-minded readers might assert that's impossible for the writer of such a critical document to have a genuine interest in the development of the open-source software. The same happened to Bernard-Henri Lévy when he published the book «American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville». Some reviewers declared BHL must have some twisted logic, otherwise there wouldn't be that «insurmountable paradox: on the one hand, a declaration of love for America every few pages; on the other, the content of the book, which is in sharp contrast with this declaration. Alas (or Dieu merci?), Lévvy cannot escape his Frenchness.» Ah bon.

Criticizing the sorry state of the open source today does not mean closed source is better. Also, the current status of the open-source projects is not bad per se, but only if we put side by side the expectations we had a decade ago with the reality we are facing now. Things could (and should!) have been much better.

What are my hopes coming from?

As Linux is still the most prominent alternative to closed source and proprietary, I will start with some Linux opportunities.

Dell's recent decision to ship desktops preloaded with Linux might be boost the progress of Linux into the business desktop. As a European, I would like to see some Mandriva-powered systems that are easy to find worldwide, however previous attempts with HP and Dell were huge failures in the end.

The remaining RHEL clones, CentOS and Scientific Linux, should increase their cooperation and even merge if deemed useful to create a solid, free of charge enterprise offering.

I started however to doubt a little about the future of RHEL after the wrong message given to the public by Matthew J. Szulik with the Red Hat Challenge. The competition is only open to «full-time, part-time, or executive student attending graduate business school or a graduate design school in pursuit of a Masters in Business Administration or similar degree», so that it sounds like having a good Linux business plan is unrelated to technology, which is hard to swallow by a techie. In addition, the challenge is only open to certain countries, giving you the message that Red Hat is too lazy to deal with the contest and gambling rules of Québec, of half of the Europe and of half of South America; however, the Microsoft Canada Holiday Greeting Card Contest 2004 was won in Québec, the winner of the Microsoft Future Pro Photographer Contest 2006 was from Romania, and the software design category of Microsoft Imagine Cup won in Italy, all of these countries missing from RHAT's list of qualifying places. It's time for Red Hat to realize that not the MBA-ers are the missing resource, but some more common sense.

I hope that Mandriva will find its way towards a positive financial balance, and that the Corporate Desktop and the Corporate Server will gain momentum. There is no way I could agree with Linux.org in their view on raising and falling distributions.

I also hope that the unjustified aura around Linux will not hide *BSD anymore, and that FreeBSD will improve its market share with time. With the backing of iXsystems, PC-BSD should continue to strive to provide a more comfortable FreeBSD power as a viable desktop alternative to Linux.

There are little chances that OpenBSD will ever change their installer, whose main asset seems to be its ability to fit on a single floppy; its claimed perfection through simplicity is diminished by a known issue mentioned by Jem Matzan in his OpenBSD 4.0 Crash Course, where it notes at page 13: «the installer will crash if you try to use DHCP with more than one network interface; you can change this manually later if necessary.»

DragonFly BSD has also an interesting potential, I wish them luck and more resources.

We might encounter improvements even from OpenSolaris, but this will be a long and winding road. Sun is still working to complete the open-sourcing of Java, and they might need a full mental rework to be able to provide with less threatening SLA and Entitlements for their commercial offerings (maybe they should fire some lawyers in the first place). Solaris Express Developer Edition is not that express, as it has has for the minimum system requirements 768 MB of RAM and 14 GB of disk space (80 GB is the recommended size). Sounds like Vista to me.

And Slackware will always matter, as long as craftsmanship, commitment, and quality make a difference.

To contradict myself, I have written parts of this report on a Pardus system, and some final edits were done under Kubuntu 7.04, both distributions I said I will not use (and I had a few KWin crashes with both of them). Like I said in the opening, we're all humans after all.

But I will never understand why IBM has not agreed to open-source OS/2.

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Copyright 2007 Radu-Cristian Fotescu and JEM Electronic Media, Inc. No reprints nor reposts without written permission from both copyright holders.