castanyes blaves

I had the opportunity to present at the Linux Symposium on Friday, and talked further about my hope that we can improve the coordination and cadence of the entire free software stack. I tried to present both the obvious benefits and the controversies the idea has thrown up.

Afterwards, a number of people came up to talk about it further, with generally positive feedback.

Christopher Curtis, for example, emailed to say that the idea of economic clustering in the motor car industry goes far further than the location of car dealerships. He writes:

Firstly, every car maker releases their new models at about the same time. Each car maker has similar products - economy, sedan, light truck. They copy each other prolifically. Eventually, they all adopt a certain baseline - seatbelts, bumpers, airbags, anti-lock brakes. Yet they compete fiercely (OnStar from GM; Microsoft Sync from Ford) and people remain brand loyal. This isn’t going to change in the Linux world. Even better, relations like Debian->Ubuntu match car maker relations like Toyota->Lexus.

I agree with him wholeheartedly. Linux distributions and car manufacturers are very similar: we’re selling products that reach the same basic audience (there are niche specialists in real-time or embedded or regional markets) with a similar range (desktop, workstation, server, mobile), and we use many of the same components just as the motor industry uses common suppliers. That commonality and coordination benefits the motor industry, and yet individual brands and products retain their identity.

Let’s do a small thought experiment. Can you name, for the last major enterprise release of your favourite distribution, the specific major versions of kernel, gcc, X, GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice.org or Mozilla that were shipped? And can you say whether those major versions were the same or different to any of the enterprise releases of Ubuntu, SLES, Debian, or RHEL which shipped at roughly the same time? I’m willing to bet that any particular customer would say that they can’t remember either which versions were involved, or how those stacked up against the competition, and don’t care either. So looking backwards, differences in versions weren’t a customer-differentiating item. We can do the same thought experiment looking forwards. WHAT IF you knew that the next long-term supported releases of Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat and Novell Linux would all have the same major versions of kernel, GCC, X, GNOME, KDE, OO.o and Mozilla. Would that make a major difference for you? I’m willing to bet not - that from a customer view, folks who prefer X will still prefer X. A person who prefers Red Hat will stick with Red Hat. But from a developer view, would that make it easier to collaborate? Dramatically so.

Another member of the audience came up to talk about the fashion industry. That’s also converged on a highly coordinated model - fabrics and technologies “release” first, then designers introduce their work simultaneously at fashion shows around the world. “Spring 2009″ sees new collections from all the major houses, many re-using similar ideas or components. That hasn’t hurt their industry, rather it helps to build awareness amongst the potential audience.

The ultimate laboratory, nature, has also adopted release coordination. Anil Somayaji, who was in the audience for the keynote, subsequently emailed this:

Basically, trees of a given species will synchronize their seed releases in time and in amount, potentially to overwhelm predators and to coordinate with environmental conditions. In effect, synchronized seed releases is a strategy for competitors to work together to ensure that they all have the best chance of succeeding. In a similar fashion, if free software were to “release its seeds” in a synchronized fashion (with similar types of software or distributions having coordinated schedules, but software in different niches having different schedules), it might maximize the chances of all of their survival and prosperity.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the stronger the “pulse” we are able to create, by coordinating the freezes and releases of major pieces of the free software stack, the stronger our impact on the global software market will be, and the better for all companies - from MySQL to Alfresco, from Zimbra to OBM, from Red Hat to Ubuntu.

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The basic idea is that if companies are coordinated in synchronized time-based releases, they create an environment that is predictable. Even though each company or project will compete for a given market or user base, there is always a common ground. Time-based software or data releases facilitate the integration between different projects. When the releases are feature-based, there is always a tendency of delaying the next version until the new features and perfectly shaped. This doesn't mean that time-based releases should not be focused in delivering great features, but it's more a case where features should be granular enough so that they can be both very innovative and striking and quickly released and used. When time-based releases are coordinated, everybody will be honest and balance their interests in generating new interesting features with the need of delivering them in time. The granularity of new features doesn't have to be strict, and a feature can be developed in parallel to a number of releases, being kept in a development branch, until it's ready to be merged to the main branch.

TV COMPUTER BUILD
Posted 2008-07-27

If assembling a system from parts, it looks better to get a somewhat larger case with a case fan, rather than a tiny case with a CPU fan. A maybe-working example of this could be:

* Silverstone GD02 case $160
* Silverstone fanless power supply $140
* An oddly-shaped heatsink apparently designed to fit in the GD02 case (advertised to run fanless for CPUs up to 65W) $50
* Celeron 430 $40
* DG45ID board $140
* 2G RAM $50
* 2.5-inch notebook drive $100
* Standard-def read-only DVD drive $20
* Wi-Fi card $50

Total hypothetical cost: $750

This has case fans, but with the slow CPU and notebook drive it may be possible to turn them off or dial them way down. The fanless power supply is expensive; the Nexus quiet power supply fan in my development system is pretty inaudible, so perhaps that is a better option, saving $70 or so and bringing total cost to only $680. A power supply fan could reduce the need to run the case fans. Scrounging for stuff on sale could save a few more dollars no doubt.

These built-from-parts systems always run over budget when it turns out some part doesn't work with some other part.

An expensive version could have instead:

* Extra-quiet case fans +$40
* E7200 processor +$85
* 4G memory +$50
* Blu-Ray drive +$80

Total extra cost +$255 so the "deluxe" approach is $1005.

Though larger and uglier, this system would be roughly comparable in cost to the Mac Mini, despite much better hardware specs. However, if a next-generation Mac Mini ever came out, I'd expect it to have specs and cost similar to the above. It would quite possibly use the X4500HD chipset, even.

Looks like nobody sells the X4500HD Intel motherboards until late August, so I'm not going to run out and buy anything. Maybe better options will come along in the meantime.