Prime Time for Open Source?

Griff Palmer of the Merc in his article Linux nears the tipping point speculates on whether it is really ready for primetime with consumers. The problem is that everyone who works with this stuff is already used to all of its oddities, so how can we tell a consumer can use it?

Well, I'm going to presume to speak a bit about it. First because I beat him (and probably most everyone else) in his serious qualification of "longevity" - I've been running Unix on the PC since 1989 - 386BSD that is. That's 15 years. Predates the invention of Linux by 2 years. And second because I'm a mom with kids and they use what I use. Period.

I do have my biases, however, since I'm the co-creator of the first open source BSD, and worked with William to write the book on it. Of course, it isn't fair we can change makefiles and upload new versions and patch kernels and yet expect regular folks to do it. Oh wait - they still it do it that way, don't they? Guess they didn't get any understanding of modularity. But then again, we didn't release that work - too early.

But Griff does bring up an important issue - poor security on Windows is very easy to exploit by both the bad guys out there and unscrupulous companies looking for an angle. Which is why we got the kids off Windows.

Yes, amazing as it seems, my kids don't use Windows. After painstakingly removing wild tangent from the kids net PC for the 17th time in 2 months, I said "Forget it - you're both moving to BSD". They migrated over that week. That was two years ago. And they've never looked back.

They exclusively run BSD on their PCs for all their school and work needs - using OpenOffice, for example, instead of Microsoft products. Over the years, it's the emerging open source applications that have made the difference is usability beyond that of a software development system.

They don't play with playstations or xbox video game consoles or use Windows packaged software, since there is an amazing amount of game and educational work already out there available. They're into astronomy, and run programs to map the stars. And that saves us a lot of time and money.

We think it's Internet access that makes the difference for kids nowadays, and since we have an internal Ethernet-based Internet network, they have their own email accounts (filtered, of course), and Internet access for research (via a proxy server). So they don't miss anything in this area. But we have had an internal Ethernet-based Internet network of computers (Symmetric 375s) since 1985, so I probably have got Griff beat there too. :-)

And they don't have any TVs - not a one lives in our house - they watch movies and shows via the Internet directly whenever they want, with streaming media. This is true on-demand entertainment. Even works no-drop via WiFi. You can't even find that at Intel Labs. Of course, it's part of my work in massive video production, so they get to play with the future.

Of course, you won't get ahold of this "next gen" world of instant-on access and ease of use in the real world. I'm told there's no business demand for it - that is, until there is business demand for it. In the meantime, I write papers for tired academics to ponder.