Loading ...By Wogan May
Exciting things have happened in the last few months. Apple’s released the iPad, a device (or platform, if you will) that’s already beginning to shape consumer demand and expectations. Other vendors are scrambling to catch up, with HP’s Slate and Microsoft’s Courier well on the way.
And then, in a major, news-worthy bungle, an Apple engineer managed to lose an iPhone prototype in public, which has sparked a whole new wave of discussion and controversy. An early look into the features shows that Apple’s getting really serious about holding on to (and expanding) their marketshare. Which they’re doing really well, seeing as they’re poised to overtake Microsoft in the financial markets.
All of this following Apple’s announcement around new coding standards and App Store submission guidelines, and the release of a new SDK, which has allowed some really cool projects to take shape. Apple is introducing what could be labelled the “killer app/platform revolution”, if you’ll excuse outdated Web 2.0 terminology.
In short, 2010 is set to be the year where our expectations (and collective paradigm) undergo a massive shift. Cloud computing is set to expand, location-aware services and games are becoming commonplace, and the future most of us have been waiting for? It’s happening.
And yes, we even have flying cars. Just saying.
But there is one question, one doubt that I keep coming across, and I can’t say I find the answers satisfactory: Where is Linux?
By “Linux”, I don’t mean the kernel, or the open-source, community-driven software initiatives like Ubuntu, Mandriva and so on. I’m referring to the community itself — the supposedly “advanced” group of people with freedom and permissions well beyond corporate or market mandates.
They who have been given the freedom of innovation, with no constraints or deadlines, where are the massive revolutions on their front?
The future is clearly mobile. Portable, location-aware, socially-conscious, cloud-centric, intelligent computing across a unified platform, with a standard UX across all the devices — that’s the dream, and it’s rapidly coming to fruition.
It’s a future Apple’s clearly grasped, with the iPhone, iPad and Mac — similar devices in almost every respect, differing only in size, portability and input devices.
It’s a future Microsoft’s getting their heads around, too, with Windows 7, Azure, and now Win 7 Mobile — a complete departure from their previous standards, aiming for improved and unified user experience.
But what of the Linux-powered open-source community? Where are their mobile operating systems, their hardware, their cloud platforms? Where are their revolutions in UIs, in cross-platform standards, in better, faster and free software? All the things they’ve promised, directly and indirectly?
Android, Chromium — these aren’t truly valid responses, since they’re owned and governed by Google. Sure, anyone can write anything for either platform, but ultimately, Google’s pushing it to the rest of the world, and it has its own mandates around profitability and marketshare gain. Just like any other corporate.
At the forefront of Linux development, you have Ubuntu, which has faithfully kept to its release schedule, but has failed to introduce anything new or groundbreaking — and correct me if I’m wrong here, because I’d rather be.
Their latest release sports a UI that hasn’t changed much, a Software Centre that’s mostly a cosmetic makeover on top of the old repository infrastructure, an online cloud/music/backup service not too dissimilar from the veritable plethora already available. How does any of this convince a Microsoft or Apple user to switch?
Then you have the other “forerunners”, offering little more than pretty desktops and Server versions of their software. Collectively, they can only lay claim to about 1% of the worldwide market.
Where has all that effort gone? UNIX was around since before either Gates or Jobs, the Linux community is far more technically advanced and intuitive than the average consumer, and between tens of thousands of coders, you’d think that by now, there’d be some serious competition coming out of their quarter.
Instead, it’s multiple versions of essentially the same software, poor quality controls for the third-party stuff, an unhealthy obsession for graphic effects (while basic graphics hardware goes unsupported), and the introduction of “new” things that people have had already. Sometimes for years.
And what of gaming? The console market is exploding, as is the casual gaming market, and yet Linux takes no advantage of either — not for marketshare nor revenue gain. It’s left up to Valve (yet another corporate), who are in the process of porting their Steam distribution platform to the Mac, and by inferred extension, Linux.
The market is changing, and pretty soon, concepts like “Programs” will give way to “Tasks”. “Folders” will give way to “Related Items”, “Taskbars” to “Workspaces” — “Save” should vanish along the OneNote route, online sharing and collaboration will become native to the way we work, and we’ll expect our preferences, files and friends to follow us from device to device.
Linux has a real shot to pull ahead here, to craft these interfaces and start laying claim to the future of computing. But it had better get its act together. To stop hiding behind “free” as an excuse for poor quality, to start taking software and standards seriously, to drop the egos and clans and work together, to merge the disparate distros into a single, master platform, to start putting a lot of effort towards making it dead-simple for existing computer and mobile users to switch.
That is what’s needed, if “open source” is to survive as a viable concept. If they don’t, then either Apple or Microsoft will get there first, and the future will belong to them.
Wogan May is a web developer, blogger and general internet-genius/obsessive hailing from sunny Strand, South Africa
http://twitter.com/woganmay
Good article Wogan! Dunno if I agree with you completely, but you are asking the right questions..
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