The Linux Foundation will be hosting our first ever End User Collaboration Summit this October in New York.

This forum is designed for sophisticated users of Linux who will be able share best practices about how they are using Linux and speak directly with the core developers of the Linux platform.

A big part of our mission is “translating” Linux. It doesn’t get any more direct than connecting key Linux developers and end users. This event provides an opportunity to actually see how technology is developed today by some really talented and dedicated people.

In addition to panel discussions, Open Spaces sessions, and End User Lightning Talks — among others — the two keynotes are from Anthony Williams, author of “Wikinomics, How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything,” and Jon Corbet, Editor of Linux Weekly News. We will also hear from Ron Hovsepian, the CEO of Novell and Paul Cormier, the President of Red Hat.

It’s by invitation, but registration is free, in keeping with the idea of having it open to end users. You can request an invitation by filling out the form here.

I can guarantee it’ll be a fascinating and extremely useful two days. We look forward to seeing you.

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Declaring victory for the Linux desktop at the end of the day will based upon looking at market penetration of Linux based clients vs. Windows and other operating systems. I believe this is still the best measure but we may finally be able to declare this year the breakout of the Linux desktop.

When looking at operating system software adoption it is important to look at trends and not a single break through event that will signal that “we have made it.” It is kind of like economic forecasting – you look at a lot of leading indicators to decide whether we are heading towards an expansion or a recession; inflation, interest rates, productivity, employment rates, etc. It is worth applying this logic when looking at the Linux desktop. Based on just a cursory glance of news this week it is clear that all leading indicators suggest a significant expansion on the horizon.

Let’s look at each of these factors individually:

1. The Usability Breakthrough; the Linux desktop has finally reached functional equivalence with Windows and Mac OS. The perfect balance of simplicity and flexibility is still being refined, but for anyone who has used Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Fedora, GoS, Zonbu, or an Asus EEE PC; it is clear that a Linux desktop is able to match Apple or Windows when it comes to functionality and usability.

2. Device support. Long a complaint of the Linux desktop user, we are finally seeing broad coverage in driver support for almost every kind of hardware available. Kernel space has really licked almost all of these with only a few small holdouts in wireless and video. Now the focus is on user space configuration tools that enable Linux users to get full functionality out of the many devices supported on the platform.

3. Economics; In order to grow the PC market beyond the saturated markets in the west, the industry is moving towards low cost PC’s to grow the overall market place. Much of this growth is coming in from Asia where manufacturers are putting the squeeze on the high license fees Microsoft charges by opting for Linux instead. This year we are seeing Linux based PC’s from almost every major manufacturer including Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo and more. This price competition favors Linux heavily because Microsoft will always be reluctant to give up their cash cow of high license fees.

4. The Netbook breakthrough; The New York Times reported last week at Intel’s developer conference “Dozens and dozens of netbooks were shown,” and “computer makers saw for the first time “just how many competitors they have.”” According to a research analyst in Times article, these devices “could cost the same as a cell phone – or lower.” This is going to open huge new markets for Linux based devices.

5. The Seinfeld factor. Microsoft Vista is a gift to Linux. Windows is having a brand meltdown. Users are unsatisfied with the OS so much so that Microsoft is trying to enlist an American icon to help change peoples minds. While Seinfeld is great, Microsoft should know that the quickest way to ruin a brand is to increase advertising for a bad product.

6. The move to mobile. It is a quickly becoming a foregone conclusion that a large portion, if not a majority of users will access the internet through mobile devices in the future. The Linux desktop benefits from this. Google’s Android platform is based on the Linux Kernel, the LiMo Foundation’s efforts use glibc, Gnome, the kernel and more. Nokia has Linux based offerings. All of this will bring more developers, both commercial and non-commercial to the Linux desktop party.

7. Web 2.0. The fact that the desktop itself is less relevant is making Linux more relevant than ever. In a world where most people access their favorite applications through a browser it makes little sense to have an expensive and bloated OS underneath. Linux is really the only option here as Microsoft is unable to innovate and Apple rules the high end of the market.

8. Business users are starting to care. IBM’s recent announcement of a Lotus enabled Linux client shows that big business is finally waking up to the value of a Linux desktop effort. IBM in particular is worth paying attention to here. When they get behind a platform it can move markets.

There continues to be challenges. Lack of games on the Linux platform continues to be a weakness, Microsoft dominates this market and leverages their experience with the Xbox and their Xbox live service. The lack of availability of Microsoft Office or a reasonably compatible Office alternative is a subject to long to write about here but obviously hurts Linux in the short run. Finally, the need for pan industry cooperation along application standards is critical. The Linux desktop may constantly divide efforts along incompatible versions of the OS and prevent a unified front against Microsoft.

At the Linux Foundation we continue to see big changes afoot enabling the Linux desktop. We continue to support educating makers of devices about how to write drivers for Linux, we continue to support improving printing on Linux through our open printing project, we are looking to bring new developers to the platform through the Linux Developer Network and continue to provide a framework for desktop and mobile standardization through the Linux Standard Base.

Why is the desktop important? Because it is symbolic. It excites programmers, it is tangible to everyone, it easy accessible and easily understood by all. Linux is finally in a position to provide a choice to Microsoft’s long held monopoly. We should never lose site of the importance of inspiring people about just how far an open operating system can go.

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When Apple launched the 3G iPhone, I must confess, I went out and purchased one. I need a smart phone for work, I need one that works both in the United States and Japan, and the consumer electronic design from Apple floored me. The screen is exquisite. The video playback is outstanding. The mobile web experience is second to none. I realize I am in a walled garden, but what a pretty walled garden it is.

Now, you needn’t remind me that I purchased my iPhone as a personal accoutrement. But as a business person, I use it for more than just personal calls and entertainment. In fact, I’ve come to rely on its excellent web access and very usable email capabilities As a business person, however, I guess I defy the expectations of product marketing managers at Apple: I have over 2,000 contacts in my phonebook; I participate in conference calls; and I visit people in offices all over the country and the globe. Even with the recent upgrade, to version 2.0 software and the availability of third-party applications, my passions remain cooled.

All iPhone users have their own peeves. As a consumer, mine include

- Mediocre radio set / wireless reception
- Underpowered and hard-to-hear ringer/vibrator
- No stereo headphone BlueTooth profile
- No ability to run an instant messaging client in the background
- Lack of ability to sync wirelessly

and as a business person, let me add

- tabbed access to phone book entries (try scrolling through 200 names beginning with “S”)
- limited ability to sync with contacts, calendars and mail not native to Mac OS X
- no cut and paste between applications
- no ability to put clickable map locations, URLs or phone numbers into the Calendar

Most of these capabilities were present on my last phone, and even on the one before that.

Now, Apple’s “opening up” with the iPhone SDK has at least introduced some excellent third-party add-ons (e.g., Funambol sync), and the 2.0 software release addressed a few of my peeves above, but most remain unresolved.

The concept of “opening” brings me to the real point of this blog entry: what does it mean for a phone to be open? There are actually five parameters of openness for a mobile device. Let’s briefly review them and how the Apple iPhone does and doesn’t observe them:

1. Open to Choose Networks and Operators

Also termed “unlocked”, right and ability to choose your carrier or operator is essential to the definition of an Open Phone. Imagine buying a PC or a server that limited you or your company to using a single ISP? While it was revolutionary that Apple could negotiate so strongly with AT&T, to the point of reinventing the operator-OEM relationship, the resulting overly tight relationship between that carrier and Apple does a disservice to iPhone end-users, as do comparable relationships crafted in other geographies.

While smart handsets in North America are almost universally locked to a single operator, those sold abroad are not. Moreover, many handsets sold locked in North America are actually available abroad in unlocked, open versions (e.g. Linux-based phones from Motorola, Samsung and others).

Frustration with Apple’s choice against openness has led to the single largest mobile phone gray market in history. 1.5 to 2 million iPhones have been cracked to run on unauthorized networks abroad. Apparently, I am not the only one having a love-hate affair with my iPhone.

2. Open to Add Applications

Workstations, consumer desktops, and enterprise servers based on Windows, UNIX, Linux and even MacOS let users and IT departments choose and deploy applications as a matter of course. When the iPhone was launched last year, Apple not only didn’t support third party applications, Cupertino took great pains to prohibit installation of ANY third party apps (as they did initially with the Macintosh, too). With the introduction of version 2.0 of the iPhone OS, Apple took real steps to remedy this deficit, but only through a carefully controlled channel and completely tame ecosystem. The iPhone will NEVER be enterprise ready until IT departments can choose their own loads, pick their own integrators and deploy their own solutions to meet their business needs.

In particular, IT managers and individual end users alike would like to be able to deploy VoIP clients like Skype, alternate productivity/connectivity applications (email, calendar, etc.), music management and ring-tone software. They’d also prefer the option of web-based IM and chat instead of SMS. It is instructive to note that worldwide, mobile operators will derive over US$50 billion in SMS revenues by 2010.

The Apple App Store, while also a large step forward, acts as a bottleneck to iPhone software distribution. Apple’s ongoing efforts to block independent installation of third-party software, and also reports of Apple being able to disable even App Store software belie any claims to openness touted by Cupertino.

3. Open to Develop Applications

The most decried limitation of the iPhone precedes and goes hand-in-hand with adding applications to a device – you first have to create them. After the half-step of enabling web applications with Webkit-based Safari, Apple finally offered up an SDK in Q1 of 2008. By all accounts, it is a very well conceived and packaged tool kit and even integrates key open source components like versions of GNU compilers and of course the BSD OS kernel. With the launch of the App Store, the market began to see the outcome of Apple nudging open the door, albeit by a crack. However, no matter how enthusiastic developers may be for the device, the software platform ties developer hands, limiting them to a single SDK, a single development language (Objective C), and most daunting of all, a single distribution channel.

4. Employing Open Standards in Design

Mobile telephony lives and dies by standards compliance. Handsets must conform to a range of technical standards requirements, but the majority of industry norms deals with radio performance and network interface (e.g., GSM, CDMA, SMS/SS7, TCP/IP, BlueTooth, etc.) and not with software, mobile handsets, even those promoted as “smart” and “open”, mobile device software development is a proprietary mostly standards-free affair. important exceptions include Java JREs (forked and otherwise), HTML/HTTP, and POSIX APIs.

The iPhone does not hesitate to follow in this tradition. The launch of the iPhone SDK amply illustrated Apple’s disdain for software standardization, eschewing Java, ANSI C/C++ and other standards-based languages for Objective C, an idiosyncratic dialect that combines C and C++ and comes out of defunct Next, another Jobs company.

Objective C may not seem to be such an egregious departure from mainstream programming languages (it’s not Algol, LISP or Lua), but the choice of language effectively locks developers into the iPhone platform, locks out ISVs with applications written in other programming languages, and gives Apple an inordinate amount of control over how iPhone applications get built and deployed. Even as Apple sells millions more iPhones and developers build and deploy iPhone applications, the resulting de facto standard platform will remain a closed entity subject to the whim of Jobs and co.

5. Building on Open Source Software with an Open Community

Apple does indeed build the iPhone with open source software: the OS is based on BSD, the Safari browser on the Webkit project, and many other elements of the base platform and user interface integrate open source software components. Just look at the Legal selection under Settings and you’ll find a cross section of open source licenses referenced for the various OSS components on the iPhone. But building on OSS does not automatically imbue a device with openness. There is no community around BSD-derived Darwin that sits at the base of the iPhone and of MacOS X as well. While there is a real community process governing Webkit, Apple exercises what many developers consider to be undue influence over the browser platform; Webkit-derived Safari, which is completely closed, with no community whatsoever.

Steve Jobs is the first to state that the iPhones lack of openness is a goal:

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers. These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

Jonathan Zittrain summed it up best, “Apple threatened (and then delivered on the threat) to transform the iPhone into an iBrick. The machine was not to be generative beyond the innovations that Apple (and its exclusive carrier, AT&T) wanted. Wheras the world would innovate for the Apple II, only Apple [and those approved by Apple] would innovate for the iPhone.”

Chuck my iPhone – Not yet!

Glancing back over my functional complaints and how the iPhone fails to pass open muster, I still have no plans to ditch my deficient device. It is still an elegant piece of hardware and software engineering and meets my needs better than 90% of other mobile market offerings. Certainly, of my peeves listed above, the software-centric issues would greatly benefit from the scrutiny of and input from a real open source developer community. I understand Apple’s desire to remain the ultimate arbiter of look and feel, but that desire for aesthetic control cuts Cupertino and its products off from the incremental enhancements that accompany openness. Only when developers can both use and also improve a product to meet their own needs and tastes does it come alive and have hopes for longevity.

Today, the mobile ecosystem has a growing number of open choices, including LiMo, Android, and soon-to-be-open SymbianOS. You can be sure I will be one of the first in line for the new Android and next generation LiMo devices when they come out.

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While everyone is talking about the fact that Jerry Sienfled has signed up to pitch Microsoft Vista it is worth noting another ad campaign that Microsoft launched last week entitled the “Mojave Experiment.” This type of advertising goes back ages and is generally used to show people that they will actually like something that they thought they disliked. In other words Microsoft feels that Vista has a bad rap due to a lot of “FUD” in the market about Vista’s poor performance, lack of security, difficulty to use, etc.

Hmmm… That sounds strangely familiar. No wonder, according to Microsoft, only 1% of the respondents were Linux users.

This is hardly a new concept in advertising. Just this year we have already seen two campaigns from companies with products in a similar situation to Microsoft Vista. Pizza Hut launched their “Tuscani Pasta Campaign” with hidden cameras at an upscale restaurant which reveals to surprised diners at the end of the evening that they are eating pasta delivered from Pizza Hut. Hardees also ran a similar “Fake Restaurant” campaign this year where a shocked diner finds out at the end of the meal he has just been served a Hardees Black Angus Burger at what he thought was an upscale restaurant. It turns out Vista has a lot in common with bad fast food.

However, the most famous campaign like the “Mojave Experiment” is the Foldgers Crystals series of ads that have ran for years. Once again it is revealed to diners at the end of a meal that they have been drinking Foldger’s crystals rather than the gourmet fresh brewed coffee they thought they were drinking. “Rich”, “Robust”, “I am amazed” chime surprised diners.

There is a dark side to this type of advertising and it took a bold Swedish television station to expose this genre of ads for what they really are; a series of carefully edited clips that only show the most positive reactions. This video reveals the truth around this form promotion.

Perhaps Microsoft should cancel their contract with Jerry Seinfeld and instead bring back “Madge.” I think lot users who are exposed to Vista would be not be surprised to hear the words, “you are soaking in it.”

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Walking around Linuxworld this year it was interesting to see the number of Apple notebooks in the halls and various sessions. It wasn’t necessarily that there were more Apple notebooks than Linux machines, but it was a good number and begs the question: why do open source people seem to cut Apple some slack when it comes to their very closed proprietary platform?

The question can be answered by thinking of operating systems like prison. For decades, operating systems have been trying to lock users into their platforms. Think of it like an operating system prison. But what if operating systems really were prisons? What kind of prisons might each of them be? Let’s look at each one:

Apple. This prison has the highest security of them all. It is a singular prison with extraordinarily high walls that govern almost every aspect of what you do. They decide what you listen to, what type of cell you get, and it is ruled over by a ruthless warden named Steve Jobs. And despite all that, it is great!

Each cell is a plush luxury suite overlooking the ocean. You can get movies ordered to your room all day and the music selection is great. Your cell mates are cool hipsters and they have great parties that last all night long. It is almost like staying at a five star hotel with the only catch being that you can’t ever leave.

Microsoft. These prison facilities are horrible. This is the largest, most difficult prison to escape from in the world but the security is horrible. Everyone is stealing each other’s data and you are sharing a cell with an angry 300 pound piece of malware. The prison warden, Steve Ballmer, walks around often claiming he wants a kinder gentler and more open prison, but everyone knows he is lying.

Solaris. This prison seems desolate and strangely empty.

Linux. This is the only platform that is not a prison. You are really free with Linux. People are congregating at will, building creative new structures. Yeah – maybe it isn’t as pretty as the luxury hotel prison that is Apple, but at least we are free. In the end it isn’t prison walls that win in technology. CompuServe and AOL were beaten by the internet. Centrally controlled mainframes were killed by the PC. Over time the best technology comes from innovation in unexpected places and while we are occasionally wooed by the pretty sounds of “You’ve Got Mail” or the stunning design of a new iPhone; we have all seen this movie before and know how it ends.

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LinuxWorld kicks off tomorrow in San Francisco. In many ways, it has a real “State of the Union” feel to it, being one of the oldest shows devoted exclusively to Linux technologies and business trends.

As Linux markets grow and innovate, so does LinuxWorld. One new area this year is the Mobile Linux Conference, an indication of the growing strength of open source on mobile platforms. It’s good to see LinuxWorld covering “the third screen” of Linux. Between Android and Symbian and even how iPhone’s closed platform is opening slightly, the influence of open source on mobile technologies is already readily apparent.

The Linux Foundation is participating directly with several different events.

– On Tuesday, August 5th, I’m giving an Enterprise Open Source Presentation at 3:30pm as part of the Executive Summit.
– On Wednesday morning I am speaking at a Breakfast briefing on Mobile hosted by Nokia. Sorry folks - invite only.
– Also on Wednesday, August 6th, I’m moderating a panel on Mass Collaboration and Linux: How achievements in server, mobile and desktop help each and every Linux user. This panel includes experts James Bottomley, a key Linux kernel sub-system maintainer and also, incidentally, chair of the Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board; Christy Wyatt, Vice President, Ecosystem and Market Development for Motorola’s Mobile Devices business; and David Liu, Founder, gOS. If you have a chance to show up and participate, I’d like to hear your opinions, either during the panel or after.

Also, everyone knows that the best networking happens outside of the official sessions. The Linux Foundation will be hosting a VIP party in the evening on Wednesday the 6th. For an invitation to the event go to the booth or track down one of the Linux Foundation staff or myself. We already have a full house, but could be talked in to letting a few more of our open source friends in for the party.

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