Your first Linux vehicle may be a pickup

A couple days ago, I caught up with Roland Smith, Senior Director of IT Information Services at AMI Semiconductor. He just started there, having recently left LSI Logic, where he worked for many years. Here are some pieces of the conversation:

We had to work with three different companies to try get them all to talk to each other some way. There was Dell and SAP and Red Hat. Each had a little piece of the puzzle, and we had to stitch it all together. But when we put it all together, man: it was a performance demon. That opened the floodgates for us. After that it was "Let's put everything on Linux. If it runs on Linux, let's get it there."

I think desktop Linux is on its way. Look at Xandros. That's a great product at a reasonable price. It has a great user manual. Just about anybody should be able to install that OS, and make it do what you want it to do. The paperwork matters. To me the biggest missing piece with a lot of Linux stuff is documentation. Without it the job isn't quite finished. Once we get past the documentation problem, there won't be any stopping it. We had fifty versions of Xandros running at LSI Logic. I can easily see the company moving to Xandros for a standard administrative kind of a desktop. And that will be a foot in the door for more of the things.

You know, we were lucky that the whole company wasn't on Microsoft Exchange. We could move off of it easily because, frankly, it was too expensive. Also the spam problem. We wanted to spend the money getting rid of spam. Meanwhile Microsoft said they were end-of-life-ing the last version of Exchange, so we had to do a huge upgrade if we stayed with it. So instead we're went with a calendar system from Oracle that's descended from Netscape's old SuiteSpot. That will do until some open source product comes along. When it does, it needs to work at the corporate level — from ten thousand down to two hundred people. It's not trivial, but it can be done.

I have my mother on Linux now. She can do email and browsing, and it works great for her. She represents a class of user. There's another class of user who wants it to be anything ... an all-purpose device with lots of components that make it complete, and that work. What we need is the generic Linux desktop you can get at Radio Shack or the equivalent. Once you have that, you really have a market that looks like the construction business. Your Linux desktop or laptop is a tool kit you can use for anything.

In the last SuitWatch <http://www.ssc.com/pipermail/suitwatch/2004-April/000070.html>, I suggested that the Linux laptop needed to aspire to the status of a Chevy Cavalier. My point was about the virtues of generica, and POGE: the Principle of Good Enough. Now, after talking to Roland, I think an equally important model, especially for Linux Journal readers, is perhaps a Chevy pickup truck, or something equally tough, handy and indestructible. The automotive (or computing) equivalent of a Fluke multimeter. Maybe a Toyota Tundra with a big silver tool box all the way across the bed, behind the cab.

The image that comes to mind is of Terry Schmidt, creator of Debian Pebble and a prime mover behind NYCwireless, which provides free wi-fi access in New York City. Terry has this old castoff military Panasonic Toughbook that's built like a brick, only stronger. You can see some pictures of Terry and his box, starting here: <http://searls.com/doc/nycwireless_gallery/source/nycwireless_01.htm>. When I visited with him in New York last year, he demonstrated his box's chops by dropping it on a hard floor from considerable altitude. If you're cringing, you've got the right image in mind. The drop would easily have killed pretty much any other laptop. But this thing just kept on ticking.

Roland's point was that something along the way is going to be a tipping point for Linux on the Destkop. His bet was with the technologists who just need a good toolbox. I'm inclined to agree. First the professionals, then the amateurs.

Which leads me to this item from my friend Stephen Lewis, who lives in Bulgaria:

There's a Tuesday night gathering in Sophia, in a beer hall, of young IT people. It's wonderful to attend their meetings and hear what they're doing. You can see that the innovation has moved from the vendors' labs into the heads and two-year old laptops of independent young techies.

Most of them have engineering and math backgrounds, and work as systems administrators for small companies. And all of them have been trying to come up with their own homebrew products: accounting, CAD-CAM, VoIP, information management, customer management -- in essence by themselves.

Some of them work for NGOs: non-governmental organizations. They're setting up networks for nonprofits. Designing inventory control. You name it. They do it all with Linux and other open source building materials. And they do it for three reasons: 1) because it's fun and relatively easy; 2) because it's free; and 3) because they're pissed off at the cookie-cutter stuff you get from the major software companies.

In that part of the world, not everybody can afford licenses. It seems to me that you see more and more of this kind of thing as you head out of the established and developing world -- into the regions where people are used to jury-rigging and getting the most out of what they already have.

Note the line about "two-year old laptops", and the fact that they work as sysadmins. These are the kinds of guys who will be taking the lead when pickup-truck Linux comes down the pike on production laptops. And by "kinds of guys" I don't mean Bulgarian dudes (though I don't exclude them). I mean the guys working for your own company.