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Ok .. so it hasn’t quite been 1 year (~50 weeks?) but what better to do at 11pm at night than write about FOSS?

Anyways, in two weeks I will have used FreeBSD and FOSS software as my primary desktop platform for one year. Its good to look back and point out some of the positives and negatives of the entire expierence.

The raw numbers look pretty good. Besides a hard disk crash back in April that required me to reinstall the operating system, I did *NOT* have to even think about reinstalling or taking the system offline for an upgrade during that period. Given that I am still running the “technology preview” branch of FreeBSD (5.x branch) which is considered “beta”, I have found this to be remarkable.

I *did* have a few unexplained crashes along the way .. I think perhaps maybe 4 total in that year period. I *believe* this has to do with heat/motherboard issues on the system rather than FreeBSD, but I am not 100% positive. Overall, system uptime has been remarkable. I have gone months without turning off or rebooting the system. I have done some hardware upgrades (CD-RW drive, keyboard, hard drive swaps, video card upgrade, etc..) that did require me to power off the system, but the remainder of the time, it has stayed online and fully functional.

Initially coming from Windows 2000 I did find some things to be ackward and slightly difficult to get my head around. Not that it was poorly designed or unnecessarily difficult but simply unfamiliar. As a result, certain tasks I used my Windows 2000 box (desktop publishing, photo editing, music, cd burning, cd ripping, etc..) — however, after my Win2k box died (hard drive crash) and I was unable to reinstall on a new hard drive (bad hardware?) I started to figure out how to do those functions on FreeBSD. A year later I have been able to adaquately transfer over ALL of my day-to-day functions to FreeBSD but have found advance music sequencing software to be lacking — granted, I don’t do this too much so its not a big deal to me.

For day to day tasks — web browsing, business functions, email, music playback, multimedia apps, web design, server administration, word processing, instant messaging, desktop publishing, etc.. I have been very productive using FreeBSD. Infact, using the power of the command line, KDE features (kioslaves, etc..) and other power-user type functions, I am actually MORE productive using FreeBSD than I could even think about being in Windows, which, I think is a HUGE deal.

During the year I have been using FreeBSD, I have seen major advancements in the FOSS applications I use. Mozilla (as well as the next gen firefox & thunderbird) went from a browser that did everything to a browser that does everything, quickly, elegently and with a simple & stable interface. Needless to say, this has received rave reviews and in many head-to-head reviews has launched Mozilla to the top and best-of-class.

KDE has made HUGE strides in usability and interface elegance. It went from 3.1 to 3.2.3 during that time period. The 3.2 release introduced Kontact, a very usable PIM client (not to mention the backend kolab server for full groupware functions), kwallet for storing passwords, kopete for instant messaging plus an astounding number of insanely great supporting apps, functions and interfaces (icons, window themes, widgets and so forth..).

Other notable updates occured to OpenOffice.org — while not the expected-to-be-super-fabulous 2.0 release (this should happen later this year, early 2005), there were some point upgrades which increased speed, fixed bugs and have made OOo my recommended desktop suite for so many people.

Scribus has proven to be shaping up into a very compelling desktop publishing application. I had a chance to try out the 1.2CVS version and quite frankly, its starting to add some really nice features that have usually been in the realm of apps such as Adobe Indesign. Very cool stuff.

In the realm of graphics, The Gimp reached version 2.0 which has simplified the interface (a bit .. still a bit ackward for those coming from Photoshop) and added lots of professional level functions. Several vector artworks apps merged into Inkscape which is quickly turning into a very nice app. Lots of the core functionaility is already built in, the interface is intuitive and its exciting to see the community that has built around this project.

Overall I have been very pleased with my use of a FOSS desktop over the past year. The advancements made (just an FYI — the ports system (apps available for FreeBSD) went from ~9,000 when I started using FreeBSD to 11,158 as of this writing..) are just astounding. I am really excited to see what the next year has in store.

On Monday, azcentral.com reported that a Maricopa County Superior Court judge gave preliminary approval to a settlement that would require Microsoft to give voucher “refunds” to all consumers and businesses that purchased Microsoft software between 1996 and 2002.

According to the article, the terms of the agreement are up to $104.6 million. During that time, more than 2 million operating systems (Windows and MS DOS) were purchased and more than 5.7 million applications (Word, Office, Excel, yada yada.) were bought.

So lets take a brief look at these terms:

2 million operating systems @ $90 (avg upgrade price) = $180 million in sales
5.7 million applications @ $208 (upgrade price for Office Standard edition) = $1.18 billion in sales

Total = $1.36 billion .. basically assuming ALL purchases were upgrades (not full versions which are considerably more) and upgrades of the basic standard editions (not professional, server or other versions) — needless to say, most likely a low estimate.

Now lets pretend that ALL of these were done end of 2002 (the deadline) and that refunds will start pouring in perhaps end of 2004 (not likely, but just for the sake of argument). So they made *atleast* $1.36 billion selling *illegal* software (violates antitrust laws) and have to pay a MAXIMUM of $104.6 million which when all said and done is bottom line a helluva good deal for Microsoft. Granted, according to the article, they will pay up to HALF of that amount to schools ($52.3 million) for un-claimed refunds (I’m guessing a substantial amount of vouchers will be unclaimed based on the results of California and other state settlements).

Bottom line? This is freaking great news for MS. Get $1.36 billion for selling illegal software, only have to pay a fine that is 3.8% of the revenue stream. Go over the two year worst-case-scenario situation outlined above and that ends up being a ~2% cost.

Of course, the actual numbers are a lot different. There was a lot of server based operating systems sold ($500-$2500 and up), full versions of the Office Professional suite ($450 and up), this over 6 years (8 years to the refund period) versus 2 years.. ultimately yielding perhaps a financial hit of perhaps 1% of revenue stream that was illegally acquired.

In addition to this, the sales promoted lock-in to the Microsoft Windows platform, helped Microsoft buyout or destory competition during that period (Netscape and a myriad of other innovative Internet startups) and ultimately bolster their stock valuation 558% during that period.

And if that was not bad enough, Microsoft gets to pour this money into the public school system to further bolster their monopoly and manipulate the ruling into a marketing opportunity to secure additional marketshare in the very important educational market (a receptive segment for Linux and Apple deployments).

Needless to say, these state settlements, European Union settlement, the federal “yes they are a monopoly, guilty, yada yada yada but we shall do nothing” stance, and other non-effective rulings are getting on my nerves.

I’m sure the $52 million (hehe who am I kidding, MS will never be required to pay that amount) really will impact a company that has a market valuation of $305,270 million and current assets in excess of $60,000 million (year over year, growing about $10,000 million..) So lets see .. they are able to add $52 million in assets (we are not talking revenue..bottom line, after taxes, liabilities and other expenses pure profit..) in less than 2 days. So they could pay off all the states in what? a hundred days and not impact ANYTHING with their operation (well cept for getting more share of the educational market).

Pure absolute umm.. [insert profanity here]

disgusting.

The US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) recommends people to ditch Internet Explorer and use a different browser.

“There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to the IE domain/zone security model, the DHTML object model, MIME type determination, and ActiveX. It is possible to reduce exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different web browser, especially when browsing untrusted sites.”

Microsoft is working on a defamation lawsuit against Sergio Amadeu, President of the National Institute of Information Technology (ITI) of Brazil. According to Microsoft, Amadeu accused the company of a ‘drug-dealer practice’ for offering the operating system Windows to some government and city administrations for digital inclusion programs.

The kicker? Bill Gates in an interview in Summer of 1998 stated essentially the same:

“Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don’t pay for the software, Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”

Giving people software to get “addicted” and then charging for it at a later date? That what I think of when I think of drug dealers .. interesting.

According to this eWeek article, the Norwegian city Bergen and German city Munich are rolling out large Linux deployments.

Bergen plans to move 100 schools and 32,000 users from Unix/Windows applications to Linux by the end of this year. The CIO of Bergen, Janicke Foss cited cost savings, not being tied to a single vendor, freedom of choice and efficient operations as the driving force behind the move.

The city of Munich, which I mentioned here before, has voted to go ahead with its Linux plans, which were intiial announced May 2003. The roll-out will be gradual, but ultimately all desktops and servers will be running Linux, OpenOffice.org and Mozilla among other FOSS applications.

According to Walter Raizner, general manager for IBM Germany, more than 75 IBM government customers including agencies in France, Spain, UK, Australia, Mexico, the United States and Japan have embraced open computing and Linux. In addition to this, Britian, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, China, South Africa and Russia are also exploring open-source alternatives to Microsoft.