Laura Cowen, Mark Johnson, Tony Whitmore and Alan Pope return to bring you episode 1 of season 4 of the Ubuntu Podcast from the UK LoCo Team!
In this week’s show:-
- We introduce the team, and welcome Mark as a new regular presenter
- We discuss whether the Free Software world actually drives innovation, or whether it just copies proprietary products.
- In the news:-
- We mention some upcoming events:-
- Indiana Linux Fest – 25th – 27th March – Wyndam Indianapolis West Hotel
- UCubed – 2nd April, Madlab Manchester, UK.
- Ubuntu App Developer Week – 11th – 15th April, All around the world
- OggCamp – Soon!
- Command line love. – Russ Philips sent us this command to help generate secure passwords:-
while [ `expr length "$WORD"` -lt 8 ]; do WORD=`shuf -n1 /usr/share/dict/words`; done; echo $WORD; WORD=""
- We introduce the UUPC Quiz!
- If you’d like to send us questions for a later quiz email quiz@ubuntu-uk.org, and we’ll have that forwarded to the next quizmaster.
- We mention some Ubuntu related news in the Bit-about-Ubuntu:-
- We introduce a new segment to compliment the ‘bit’, called Not-about-Ubuntu:-
- Finally we have your feedback.
Comments and suggestions are welcomed to: podcast@ubuntu-uk.org
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[...] Last night, episode 1 of season 4 of the Ubuntu UK Podcast aired. It’s great to have it back and I for one will be looking forward to the fortnightly shows with much anticipation. I’ve been following the podcast for just over a year now and if you haven’t tuned in I would highly recommend it. You can head over to their website to download and listen to last nights show or past shows here: http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/2011/03/02/s04e01-new-frontier/ [...]
Welcome back! You were missed.
Enjoyed the show, everyone was great. Very nice looking site, and complete with the excellent Ubuntu font too.
And you were missed as well.
Good to have you back. I always enjoy the shows. Production is good. I have to say an hour is a good length. Some other podcasts are well over that and maybe don’t need to be.
I didn’t do too well on the quiz, but I was shouting ‘Ubuntu Studio’ at you in the car
Thanks Steve. It was fun to make. I think you’re right about duration, an hour seems to be the sweet spot.
Hai guys o/ !!! welcome back!!!
Live show was awesome. I love all the little mistakes you guys did, makes it much more real.
Also when you were talking about whether or not “Free Software world actually drives innovation” I hope you were strictly referring to consumer products. I do agree that free software doesn’t dazzle the market much but in other areas it basically took over. There are so many projects out there that are leading the way I don’t think I have time or space here to name them all. Here’s a couple to refresh your memory: Joomla, WordPress, Ruby, Apache, jQuery, KHTML/WebKit and just about everything that is any good in Java (must be hundreds of projects). But these are quite different because they are not “products”. So if the question is “can a community driven product make it on the market” then my answer is NO. There are open source based products on the market but none of them are community driven: Android, WebOS, Chrome, TiVo(runs linux), cloud services(Twitter is written in Python AFAIK) and so on. Firefox looks like an anomaly but it’s not: Firefox is not a product but a movement amd it was always about making the web free, which they succeed.
keep it up,
Sorin.
As much as I love Firefox, it wasn’t the first web browser to have tabs. It was beaten to the punch by Opera in 2000, IBrowse in 1999, and BookLink’s InternetWorks in 1994, cf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(GUI)
Great episode otherwise, folks, welcome back
So glad I managed to stumble onto new series… Going to listen on Monday – That’s my trip to work sorted.
On open source leading the way, call me narrow-minded but I don’t believe there’s much scope for developing a truly innovative application that finds widespread adoption: the main applications in use now (word processor, email client, spreadsheet, web browser, graphics editor, media player) haven’t changed much conceptually in the last 10-15 years or so at least and both proprietary and open source projects have been moving incrementally since then. So I don’t think we should be too disheartened that there hasn’t been a killer app which started as an open source project.
There are some aspects of the desktop Linux experience that are definitely innovative and have been picked up by Apple and Microsoft. I don’t just mean the Compiz eye-candy, but genuinely useful stuff like multiple virtual desktops, and package managers aka app stores. And as Sorin says, there’s loads of stuff under the hood.
I wasn’t thinking so much of “community driven products”, but more of “free software products”. I don’t have any issue with a product or service I use having commercial backing, my issue is that the product/service/format that the non-geeks use (and therefore the one I end up having to use to some extent) is usually the one that was there first, which so far has always been a non-free option.
A fine example of this would be Ogg Vorbis. While it’s technically a superior format, MP3 had wider market adoption first, so it’s become the defacto standard even though it’s arguably not a free format. As a result, Spotify dont support you playing local Oggs, since there’s not enough demand from their user base (cue cries of hypocrisy for me using Spotify, but there’s another example). Therefore, if I want tracks on my Spotify playlist which aren’t on Spotify, I *have* to use MP3.
Of course I accept that there’s plenty of server technologies where free software leads the way, but servers are never going to be “the next big thing”
Well what about Android then or Chrome ? Those are free software products and they’re really big and only getting bigger. But the thing is the only difference between those two and other closed source products is that you get the code with each release. I really don’t see any (direct) corelation between them being open source and them being succesfull. I mean you can do that with just about anything, it doesn’t guarantee success nor failure, as long as it doesn’t ruin your business model. There is no reason why Twitter couldn’t open up their server for example.
So do you think the business model might be the problem? The fact that open source doesn’t give you the same “freedom” to run a business? Or could it be that people that are succesfull entrepreneurs are not usually open source supporters. I know I can see that over here in Romania but it’s not as bad everywhere. For example in Germany there’s a really strong open source culture that goes hand in hand with small businesses and antrepreneurship. It doesn’t have a huge impact on the consumer market but it’s there and I think it can grow.
> Well what about Android then or Chrome ?
Granted, Android has a larger share in iOS than some markets, but iOS still made it to mass market first. I think it’s fair to say (phone salesmen, correct me if I’m wrong) that normal phone buyers (read: non-geeks/non-apple haters) see Android phones as cheaper alternatives to iPhones, and would still buy an iPhone if money was no object.
Chrome on the other hand, I will give you. Even in an apparently saturated market it’s taken a significant share from IE. And more people using non-IE browsers makes my life as a web developer *so* much nicer
> So do you think the business model might be the problem? The fact that open source doesn’t give you the same “freedom” to run a business?
> Or could it be that people that are succesfull entrepreneurs are not usually open source supporters.
That’s the crux of my question. I remember seeing a talk not long ago about whether there was a “critical mass” (in terms of revenue) for a company who’s product FLOSS. Perhaps that critical mass is too small to interest the kind of investors needed? Seemingly the only way to mitigate that is to get value from something else, which in Google’s case with Android (and I assume to some extent Chrome) is the user’s data, and that’s not ideal from a freedom-lover’s view. I’d much prefer my data to be distributed and encrypted (e.g. Diaspora), but then where’s the value going to come from? Seems like a Catch 44.
> It doesn’t have a huge impact on the consumer market but it’s there and I think it can grow.
Here’s hoping!
Your discussion on how open source is always the follower in the development of new trends. Well this is true in the desktop environment. In other spaces this is not the case. Supercomputers almost exclusively run Linux, internet servers are more often that not Linux based, and the software for managing and serving the web is dominated by open source. Embedded is an other area in which open source is very dominant. Lastly lets not forget that Android and Symbian are open source, and Android is the largest market share and Symbian has the largest install base of any operating system in the world at over 2 Billion phones.