Encryption is not for the bad guys

I've been reading a lot of articles about presidential candidates and their stances on encryption for online privacy. It befuddles me how ridiculous their arguments are. You hear things like "only evildoers use encryption" or "if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't be against this."

These are the same arguments that gave us our miranda rights, protection against illegal search and seizure, etc. Just because a citizen exercises their right to privacy does not mean they are hiding something, nor can it be taken as probable cause to remove their rights.

Saying that law enforcement needs to remove encryption so they can find bad guys is like saying houses need to have open windows so they can see in to houses. It's like saying we should do away with home security systems because only people with illegal items use them.

Any candidate that wants to keep me from protecting my privacy and security on the grounds of protecting me from some would-be terrorist is on a power trip and does not stand for the same constitution that I do.

The GOP/DEM Circlejerk

This is slightly off from my normal blog topics, but it is election season. As I stare off with an uncontrolled dazed look on my face, pondering which candidate to vote for, a deep depression has set in.

I could choose Obama. At least I'll know what I'm getting, even though I disagree with his wealth distribution policies and bailing out too-big-to-fail companies that are sending us in a spiral of debt.

I could choose Romney, since I'm Republican, but I honestly don't like him as a person, and I feel he will serve money hungry people more than a strict capitalist agenda.

I could vote Libertarian, but, let's be honest, that will just take votes away from one of the other candidates. At this point, a vote for anything other than Romney is like voting for Obama.

My depression begins when I consider that the two primary political parties are only interested in preserving themselves. Considering that Democratic and Republican platforms have morphed every election campaign into what they think will get them voted into power, or attempt to separate themselves from one another, I can never be sure that the party I choose on my beliefs really fits who I'm voting for.

Every election it's the same thing: "Your problems are because of <insert opposite party>." Neither party will say "our platform allowed these problems to happen" or "the bills we voted caused a downturn in the economy, we'll revert that and try something else."

Let's consider this. Say you work at a company. You and another co-worker handle a particular product or service together. You work well together, bouncing ideas and patting each other on the back. One day, your manager quits, and since your company promotes from with-in, you know that you or your co-worker are going to replace him. You'll get more money, access to the executive bathroom, more vacation days, etc.

So during the manager's last couple weeks, you work your ass off. You make sure that the higher ups responsible for the decision see your hard work. You are basically campaigning for this new position. Your co-worker, being prudent, does the same thing.

Now, instead of working closely together, you are both trying to make yourself look more important and more manager-like. During these few weeks, arguments ensue, and instead of trying to build a great product or service, you are positioning, spreading distrust against your co-worker and generally being unproductive, all for the power of that promotion.

In the end, your co-worker wins out. You blame it on him bringing the top-shelf bottle of liquor to the Christmas party and taking the boss out to golf with some no-name NBA player that his cousin is towel-boy for. It's definitely not because he's better.

Now you stew in your hatred toward him as he becomes YOUR boss. At first, you continue to do your job, until one day he tells you that he thinks the product would be better if you changed one aspect. This doesn't sit well with you. "Who does he think he is?" It wasn't your idea, so it must be crap. You toss all logic aside and just hate his suggestion, regardless of the fact that it will save tons of money and is generally better at solving a certain problem than your solution would have been.

You do as you're told, but you don't have it in you to put in 100% effort. You don't necessarily sabotage the product, but the solution he asked you to implement is definitely half-assed and you don't care.

Now the product goes into production, and sure enough, the implementation falls flat, the one that you worked on. However, it was his idea, so you don't care. When the firestorm comes down from above, you blame the problem on your back-stabbing co-worker that took yer job. "He wanted it implemented this way, but I wanted to do it different." Sure enough, he's canned and now you have the manager job.

You got what you wanted. The power courses through your veins like an espresso hopped up on Redbull. You are the man. Now, two people work for you, one of whom was there when you did the poor implementation, and overheard you complain about your manager at the water cooler. He knows what you did, and has a distaste for how you got your new job. He thinks you are incompetent and undeserving: He is just like you used to be.

You get my meaning here? How can we expect Congress or the President to do anything useful if their entire intent is to make their affiliate party look good, not to mention, self-serve their lust for power? How is the President supposed to get anything done when his counterparts in Congress are trying to set him up for failure so they have bullet points on the next presidential election?

I wish I had some sort of proposal to fix this, but alas, I'm not a political scientist, so all I can do is bring the bad news.

The Community Conundrum: PowerPC

In my recent work, I've been dealing a lot with PowerPC. As an old Mac user, I've had a soft spot for PowerPC for ages. Like most people, until recently, I've considered PowerPC an aging and dying architecture. Even with IBM selling PowerLinux systems, the lack of cheap hardware for developers has left a hole not easily filled, no matter how man old PowerMacs you buy in eBay.

However, there are a lot of PowerPC platforms that do fill this gap left by PowerMac. Some are even 32-bit platforms that can compete in today's markets.

So why have you never heard of them? Why can't you download Fedora or Ubuntu to install on your PowerPC of today? Several reason:

• Distributions don't really support it.
  
• The "community" behind it is driven at the kernel and low-level, not at the distribution level (see last bullet item).
  

This circle of support appears to be the hold up. Convincing even community supported architectures like Ubuntu and Fedora to support these different kernel flavors is met with archaic skepticism, and is usually concluded with "there is no community" to which I usually respond "because there is no support."

Something has to give here. Linux and Open Source isn't where we want the chicken-and-egg scenario to happen. You can't walk up to a Linux distro with a community and say "Here we are, let's do this" in much the same way as you can't go to a community and say "Come over here with us. We don't support you yet, but we'd like you to prove that you're worth it."

So where to begin...

Why Linux will (has?) hit a wall in popularity with normal users...

So this is one of the few times I decide to get political and/or rational. Most of my career has been spent on Linux. And while the gettin's good, I don't subscribe to the notion that Linux, as a desktop, will take over the World.

Let me make one thing clear. I do believe Linux, as a core, will succeed in many forms. On the server, on mobile products (where it is the core and not exposed directly to the user, a la Android).

So here's the problem as I see it. Too many choices. Yes, this has been beaten to death, and to some extent, many Linux vendors have taken note. Debian used to be a free-for-all where all of the choices were exposed to the user. People who used Debian loved the choices, but the fact isn't that they loved the choices, they just loved that their choice was among them.

If you didn't have a preference, for example with a Desktop environment, then choices are bad for a user. They didn't know how to pick one. So now, there is a default. That's great, but across many Linux distributions, even if the default is Gnome, the little nuances of each system will overwhelmingly differentiate the entire thing so that no Gnome desktop is truly the same as another distribution.

So why are choices bad? I want to take an example from a book I was reading recently called The 4-Hour Workweek. It tells of a watch company that wanted to advertise in a magazine. The watch company had many different styles of watches and wanted to put a full page ad that showed off 6 of them. The advertising executive said they should pick one watch and show off that one. To settle the dispute, they had two full page ads: one with the 6 watch layout, and the other with a single watch. Don't you know that the single watch ad out-performed the 6-watch ad by a factor of 6? Interesting...

So anyway, choices are bad for consumers. They would rather have one choice, even if it may limit them in some way. Apple figured this out when they almost went the way of the Commodore by making so many damn types of Macintoshes (when Jobs wasn't at the helm). Microsoft also learned this when they had an extensive list of Windows variants (Full/Pro/Home/Home-Pro/Server/etc/etc), but I don't think they've recovered from that very well.

Now on to the meat of the problem. Linux, too many choices...what can be done? Well, as a developer, not much. It's not our job to make these decisions. We are the ones that give all the choices. Drivers for every device, apps that do anything you want, themes, icons, documentation, hardware support. The real issue at stake is some company needs to break out of the "We're a Linux distribution" mold.

Let's take Dell's Ubuntu Linux offering as an example (I'm not knocking this effort, I helped start it when I was working for Canonical, it's a great offering). If a normal user somehow gets to the Dell Linux page, and they say "wow, what is this Linux thing?", they will surely go to Google.com and start checking. Bad? Hell yes. The huge amount of information, choices and decisions becomes quickly apparent to them. They start asking questions like "Is Ubuntu the _right_ Linux for me?" and "Should I try other Linux's as well" and "Why does Dell only offer Ubuntu?".

Indeed, these are good questions, but for which there is no answer that is going to take the average user from "I've always used Windows/MacOS and know how it works" to "I'm going to try this thing called Linux."

In my opinion, as unfortunate as it may sound, in the end, some company will deliver a product that makes no mention of Linux other than in the copyright attributions and source code, and will call it something completely different. Maybe they will call it Chrome OS?

Where the hell have I been?

Well that's a damn good question. Looks like I've been off the map for about 6 months now. Completely dropped off the face of the earth, at least as far as the open source community is concerned.

So what happened to me? Long story (always is when you really mean you don't want to talk about it). Fact is, I'm not sure what happened. It's almost amnesiatic (real word? Firefox says 'no').

Anyway, time to move one from there and forward to here and then beyond. Currently unemployed, which sucks. Started writing my own applications. Decided to take a crack at making money directly. No, this isn't code-for-hire type stuff. It's the ugly underbelly of the Internet: bucks-off-of-click-throughs. I like to call it "booct" (pronounced like "booked").

So I've been working on getting booct the past couple of weeks. The usual suspects come into play: Facebook, Amazon, MySpace, iPhone App Store, various affiliate programs, etc. There's a vast sea of ways to make money for people who can push content. I'm hoping that as a one-man programmer/content-pusher, I can do my part to clog your social networking with games, quizzes and other useless items and trinkets.

So welcome me back, but don't expect much.

The Linux Ecosystem...Changes Ahead

So I've been privy to, and sometimes involved in, many conversations about the Linux ecosystem. How it evolved, how it is now, and where it will go from here. The most important factor has been how Linux kernel development has been funded over the years and what needs to happen to ensure it remains funded.

Given that Linux is not owned by anyone (not even by us, the developers) it is hard to say who should and will fund its future. The tides of money are constantly shifting as companies involved in this ecosystem decide where they fit in, what they want from it, and ultimately, how much they are willing to spend and for how long.

So let's go through some history. I'd like to remind people that I am not an expert on Linux kernel history in this sense. This is all from my recollection over 10+ years of being involved.

In the beginning (the past)

Well, there wasn't much. Let's face it, in the start, it was a hobby for most everyone. No company took it seriously. The device vendors that did write drivers did so out of free will, and usually poorly. Volunteers still had to munge it and cram it into the main kernel tree. It was a much simpler time. Folks did things for vanity and sheer enjoyment.

We can relate this time to when things got done because some individual wanted it done. Corporations were still on the sidelines waiting to see what happened (if they were even looking at all).

At this point, people were working on the kernel in their free time. Lots of them were in college, which means no families to support, no mortgage, no worry about retirement. I'm sure a lot of people (including myself) thought "This looks good on a resume, plus I get to do things I like".

The corporations emerge (still the past)

So at some point, people decided they wanted to make a living off this thing called Linux. Everyone knew that for the hardwares vendors to care about Linux, it had to have a corporate entity to talk to and users demanding. The boom of venture-capital-backed Linux vendors emerged (aka distributions). We know they have come and gone over the years, with only a few emerging in the black.

These companies positioned themselves in many different ways. Some trying to become service oriented, while others relied on licensing to make their money. I wont delve into this topic much, but let's look at how these Linux vendors advanced.

Remember, we are just coming out of the previous stage. No corporations are yet seriously funding development in Linux. It, in itself, is still a long ways off from having all the features that users really want in an OS. How do these distributions get these features? Easy, they hire developers that have been doing this all along.

This is the initial way things get done. You pay someone to do it.

So how did this fall on the distributions? Simply because the corporate distributions required it in order to compete in the market. The OEM's and hardware vendors didn't care. Their stuff was selling on Windows and Unix platforms without problems. They had no financial requirement or user demand to worry about supporting Linux at this point. If their hardware was popular enough with Linux, someone would write a driver for it.

Enter the hardware vendors (sort of past and up to now)

Now that Linux is starting to be a commercial "thing", hardware vendors are taking notice. Not only because of the press around it, but because their own customers are starting to demand it. Big customers.

In addition, companies are starting to see a way for them to piggyback on all the hype and press coverage. If you're "Linux Friendly", you've got a whole bunch of geeks with purchasing leverage behind your company.

Large hardware vendors are starting to take notice. Companies devote whole groups of engineers at supporting Linux. And not just in some odd way, they are doing it our way. Open, and in the community. They work with distributions to get early adoption of drivers. They work with upstream to integrate these drivers and features into the kernel. They participate in steering the process, and drive a lot of what we do. OEM's can finally lay down the requirement "Must be supported in Linux" to their ODM's.

Where did these engineers come from? Right from the Linux kernel community. Most people hired to work on the Linux kernel by a company, cut their teeth for zero money in the community. Some of them have also been hired away from the distributions.

As a previous hiring manager for Ubuntu's kernel team, I can tell you personally, I generally skipped the CV and went straight to the kernel commit logs and linux-kernel mailing list to verify someone. The CV was just a backup.

This is one of the beauties of our process. On a CV, most people look good. Even their references (which they choose) are all likely to tell you what you want to hear. But nothing can tell about a persons personality like the thread from 6 months ago where this person tried to get a feature accepted upstream on lkml. You wouldn't have seen how this person either defended themselves valiantly, or wussed out just because Alan Cox had some harsh words. You wouldn't have known about how they worked for months to take their original idea and rework it to suit the issues brought up on submission, or whether they let the idea die because they couldn't handle the criticism.

Back to the topic though...I'll repeat, these hardware vendors are hiring kernel developers. But it isn't just the hardware manudacturers. You also have companies like Oracle, Google and VMWare hiring them. Some companies even have enough cashflow that they can hire a high level upstream kernel developer for pure bragging rights, or a consortium sponsored by many companies hiring people to just keep doing what they were doing for nothing.

This is definitely where the shift comes in. More and more, we see hardware vendors developing Linux drivers that are released at the same time the device goes public. This development is occurring in-house, and not out in the community. Sure, the community still integrates it, and goes through the code review process, but how many new drivers are coming from someone not associated with the vendors that made the device? Fewer and fewer.

The road ahead...(now and into the future)

So as things move ahead, there will be less for the distributions to do for hardware support. Most vendors will produce the driver, and community+distributions will play a big part in integrating these drivers. New subsystems will emerge to support new ranges of devices. It's not too hard to see vendors working together in the community to solidify features and API's that their drivers need (e.g. mac80211, GPU, other wireless technologies, multi-core features, memory management, etc).

Most developers will cut their teeth on helping to integrate and enhance these things from the vendors. The community will revolve around major restructuring of the kernel to ease development and improve stability.

So where does that leave the distributions? With the majority of the kernel work being handled by vendors, the distributions will fall into a level of consumption. Let's face it, distributions are best at integration (which is part development, so let's not get confused). Distributions are also good at noticing trends, which are fed upstream. Yes, they will still drive new ideas, and possibly even develop these ideas in-house, but they wont be the ones driving the the bulk of the work because they wont be the ones creating the new hardware that will require it.

The idea that distributions should ultimately be responsible for the kernel funding is not possible to sustain. In the current ecosystem, it is not required for a distro to invest heavily in upstream kernel work. Because Linux is open and free, there is nothing forcing them to do so. If this company instead invests heavily in integration and usability, they will produce a better product for the masses, beating the other distributions in the end, and leaving the kernel developers hired by those other distributions without jobs.

In the end...(entirely made up)

If a distribution is popular enough, the hardware vendors will want it to run on their goods. OEM's and hardware vendors who work together to help bring support for their hardware to the kernel will ultimately beat out competitors. The age where Linux is in-demand enough to create this ecosystem is close at hand, and in some ways, already exists.

Nothing is written in stone. No one can predict what will happen, we can only speculate. However, we can probably be assured that the funding to keep Linux around will come from many places, maybe even ones we haven't thought of yet.

I, for one, look forward to what's ahead.