Power of Thought

The only real thing that the iPhone and the Gphone have in common at the moment are five letters.

Google’s plans for the mobile phone market have caused quite the stir Monday, even though the company’s press conference Monday morning didn’t add much to what we already knew about Android, a collection of software that could be a catalyst for Linux on mobile phones over the next few years. Still, when any company the size of Google makes noise about steering its ship in a certain direction, people take notice.

One nice development is that we can stop calling the damn thing the Gphone, which stopped being cute awhile ago in the fine tradition of J-Lo, A-Rod, and K-Fed. But while both Apple and Google will be selling mobile phone software in late 2008, the companies seem determined to walk a fine line in their new dual relationship as trusted partner and wary competitor.

Android is a nice idea; take the promise of Linux as a mobile operating system and finally give it a backer with some legs. This could set Google up nicely for the future if mobile phones continue to turn into little computers, since companies like Symbian and Microsoft are far from entrenched in this market.

Apple is also eying that future. Much of what Google said about Android during its press conference–such as the desire for a better Internet experience on mobile phones–was uttered by Apple CEO Steve Jobs in January during the presentation of the iPhone. And it’s already sold 1.4 million iPhones in three months.

So this time next year, are we going to be talking about the looming showdown between Google and Apple in mobile computing, or the surprising resignation of Google’s Eric Schmidt from Apple’s board of directors?

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It probably won’t run Crysis or other state-of-the-art games, but a Linux-based PC that Wal-Mart began offering this week for $199 should get the job done for e-mail, Web browsing, and other everyday computing tasks.

The Everex TC2502 Green gPC is one of the first Linux-based desktop machines to be offered for sale by a major retailer. As such, it could become a barometer of open source software’s potential for success in the consumer market.

The gPC comes preloaded with the gOS operating system — a Linux variant — and a 1.5-GHz processor manufactured by Intel clone maker Via Technologies. The rest of the specs include an 80-Gbyte hard drive and 512 Mbytes of DDR 2 memory.

There’s no monitor included, but buyers get stereo speakers and a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive.

As for software, the gPC comes with the free OpenOffice.org 2.2 productivity suite. The suite, which includes word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications, recently won backing from IBM.

Everex is a Taiwanese-based PC maker that’s looking to carve a niche for itself in the computer industry’s economy section. A version of Everex’s gPC that runs the basic edition of Microsoft’s Windows Vista is on sale at Wal-Mart for $298.

The retailer is making the gPC available at selected stores and through its Web site.

The price difference between the Linux and Windows version of the computer reflects what some in the tech industry derisively call “the Microsoft tax” — a Windows licensing fee that PC makers must pay to the Redmond, Wash., software maker for each computer sold.

It’s unlikely that Linux-based PCs will displace Windows-powered computers anytime soon. For one thing, there’s only a limited number of applications that will run on Linux.

Linux advocates argue, however, that until they become more mainstream, open source systems could fill some important niches — such as the market for cheap PCs aimed at students in low-income areas.

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There’s a few applications that would help make Linux more of a mainstream OS, but don’t expect to see them ported to Linux anytime soon. One of the least discussed in this fashion? Adobe Photoshop.

Yes, I know I’ve said before that in my purview Linux doesn’t need mainstream success to be “succesful”, but this is one of those canards that gets waved under my nose often enough that it needs to be addressed at least once.

Why Photoshop? For one, apart from Microsoft Office, it’s one of the most broadly used programs in the whole of the computer world, both Mac and PC. Everyone either wants Photoshop or “a program like Photoshop.” And in many cases, they don’t have the luxury of choosing: they’re in a graphic-arts or design job where Photoshop is mandatory, not optional. By far the most overriding reason is support for CMYK colorspaces (you can’t do proper graphics work for print without CMYK support). Lack of proper CMYK support is one of the biggest reasons why GIMP, the open-source Photoshop-like app for Linux, hasn’t been able to displace Photoshop in a professional context.

And why no Linux-specific version of Photoshop? First, and most likely, Adobe probably believes there just isn’t a market for Photoshop on Linux — yet — especially since the perceived size of that market isn’t even a fraction of its total sales, whether for Mac or Windows.

There’s also the question of commercial application support on Linux, a topic which deserves its own post but which can be summed up this way: Closed-source apps generally only get supported on a couple of distributions at a time — Red Hat and SuSE are two of the biggest, although Ubuntu is turning up more and more — since the effort involved for more than a couple of distros is more than many software companies want to take on.

(This is where I agree at least in part with Alex Wolfe about there being too many distros — too many for the software makers, but that still means a plurality of choices for the users.)

What’s ironic is that a while back, Adobe had an IRIX version of Photoshop available for a number of Silicon Graphics computers. I played with an SGI O2 workstation that had it running, and it operated exactly like its Windows counterpart. Surely it wouldn’t be difficult to take the work done for the IRIX version and apply that to a Linux edition? Probably not — programming for IRIX, Linux, and the Mac OS are almost certainly as unalike as it gets in many ways.

Finally, there’s the problem of third-party add-ons. Photoshop has a giant library of plug-ins, and many Photoshop users are married to their plug-in collections. Said plug-ins would not work on Linux, unless a) they were rewritten from the ground up (not terribly likely) or b) the Linux edition of PS had, say, some kind of back-end into Wine that allowed the plug-in to run correctly. There’s always the possibility of running the Windows edition of Photoshop in an emulated Windows session or in Wine, but that sort of defeats the point.

So if Adobe ever bothers to offer Photoshop for Linux, I suspect it’s going to be for very specific breeds of Linux, and not Linux generically. I’m dead certain Adobe is not about to make Photoshop into an open-source product; they’re going to be as stalwart about this as Microsoft is about Office. But again, it’s a question of how much Adobe feels it’s likely to get back for that effort — which, at this point, is probably not a lot at all.

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The Software Freedom Law Center said Thursday that it has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against a consumer electronics company, Monsoon Multimedia, for allegedly violating the license that governs the use of the Linux operating system.

This is the first case filed in the United States against a company for allegedly not complying with the terms of the General Public License (GPL) version 2, according to the SFLC, which provides legal representation for free software projects. The GPL is used by Linux and countless other free and open-source software programs.

The suit was filed on behalf of the creators of BusyBox, a set of Unix utilities used in embedded systems and licensed under the GPL version 2 (see complaint).

Under the terms of the GPL version 2, people can use GPL software within their own products. But when they redistribute that software, they must make the source code available.

A request to see the source code used by Monsoon Multimedia came up in a discussion forum, but a request sent by the SFLC to the firm was not answered, according to an SFLC representative.

Representatives from Monsoon Multimedia, which makes digital consumer devices for viewing video on the PC or TV, did not comment on the suit on Thursday.

The plaintiffs in the case are Erik Andersen and Rob Landley, who hold the copyright to the BusyBox software. They are seeking damages and an injunction.

The Free Software Foundation has made many efforts over the years to enforce the license, but typically has taken a much lower-key approach. A programmer in Germany, Harald Welte, has been more aggressive, though, in a case that was settled.

Linux is widely used inside consumer electronics devices, such as the digital video recorder TiVo and those that Monsoon Multimedia makes.

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Microsoft Corp. has replaced its controversial anti-Linux “Get the Facts” Web site with a kinder, gentler site explaining how its Windows Server operating system compares to open-source Linux as well as other competitive OSes.

The new WindowsServer/Compare Web site provides information about how Windows Server stacks up in total cost of ownership, reliability, security, manageability and interoperability with Linux, Unix and IBM Corp.’s mainframe architecture.

Microsoft has posted customer information, feedback from industry experts, white papers and resources about the capabilities of Windows Server on the site. It also offers information for developers building applications on Windows Server.

Microsoft said the new site is an evolution of its Get the Facts campaign, launched in mid-2003 and seen by many as a direct slam against Linux and open source.

The campaign compared Windows Server favorably against Linux and other technologies in terms of some of the same factors handled on the Compare site. Get the Facts was panned by Linux proponents. Their ire in part may have been due to the outspoken swagger of then Microsoft rising star Martin Taylor who led the campaign. After 13 years at Microsoft, Taylor abruptly left the company in June 2006 and no explanation was given for his departure.

Since Taylor’s departure, Microsoft has appeared on one hand to be more friendly toward Linux and open source while on the other continuing to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about those technologies, according to the open-source camp. Linux proponents gained fuel for their side when Microsoft executives earlier this year made bold claims that Linux and other open-source software violate more than 230 of Microsoft’s patents.

At the same time, Microsoft has put former IBM Linux executive Bill Hilf front and center stage as its open-source advocate. The vendor also recently launched a new open-source Web page that explains how the company views its relationship with the open-source community.

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