Those coat hangers of yore were brought to mind by the news this week that Nokia is trying to sell its headquarters. The plan is to save cash by leasing the building back as a tenant. It's not the kind of news that bumps up the stock price. Ozymandias has got nothing on Nokia. Twelve years ago, the company utterly dominated the global market for cellphones. It was hiring employees at a rate of 1,000 a month. In an article I wrote about Finland and open-source software that spring, I described Nokia as "an aggressive, fast-growing, fully global company that makes Microsoft look like an old fuddy-duddy."

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My decision to switch didn't reflect any major unhappiness with the Mac OS, which I still consider the class in the desktop/laptop market. Rather, it reflected my problems with Apple.

Specifically, I was concerned because of the implications of  the company's huge success with the iOS family of products -- the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch -- and its smothering control of the ecosystem around those products. First, even though Apple has relented in small ways on its control-freakery, the fundamental nature of the ecosystem remained: You essentially need Apple's permission to be part of it in almost every serious way.

Second, the company's focus centers on the iOS ecosystem. Steve Jobs and his colleagues see what they call "curated" -- a more polite word for control -- systems as the way of the future. That inevitably leaves uncurated systems -- that is, ones where people don't need permission to build on them -- in a second-class status.

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This is why, for more than a decade, I've been using a Mac as my primary computer (and had been using Macs for some of my work long before that). Apple's personal computers continue to be the best combination of hardware and software on the market today.

So why am I about to migrate to Linux (aka GNU/Linux)? Because Apple is pushing me away, and because I value some principles, perhaps almost religiously, that affect other decisions.

Apple is pushing computer users as fast as it can toward a centrally controlled computing ecosystem where it makes all the decisions about what native applications may be used on the devices it sells -- and takes a cut of every dollar that is spent inside that ecosystem. This is a direct repudiation of its own history, and more broadly that of the larger personal-computing ecosystem, where no one can stop anyone else from writing and distributing software that other people might want to use.

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But in a CNET article taking a look at the obstacles hindering the growth of the technology market in Brazil, reporter Ina Fried suggests that many of those computers don't stick with their Linux-based operating systems for very long.

...Some estimates show as many as 18 or 19 out of every 20 machines sold with Linux ultimately are converted to some form of Windows.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/08/27/brazil_and_linux/feed/ 10 http://www.salon.com/2008/03/11/linux_walmart/ http://www.salon.com/2008/03/11/linux_walmart/#comments Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:29:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/machinist/blog/2008/03/11/linux_walmart Wal-Mart announced on Monday that it will not restock its shelves with the $200 Green gPC, a Linux desktop computer that the retailer had been selling in some stores as a test of the open-source OS's appeal.

The company stocked about 600 of its stores with the machines last October. Wal-Mart wouldn't say how poorly they sold, but a rep told the Associated Press, "This really wasn't what our customers were looking for."

Everex, the Taiwanese PC maker that produced the Green gPCs, says that sales were better on Wal-Mart's Web site. Wal-Mart will continue to sell the machines online.

Wal-Mart ends test of Linux in stores

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/03/11/linux_walmart/feed/ 30 http://www.salon.com/2007/08/13/sco_suit/ http://www.salon.com/2007/08/13/sco_suit/#comments Mon, 13 Aug 2007 15:51:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/machinist/blog/2007/08/13/sco_suit Late on Friday afternoon Judge Dale Kimball of the U.S. District Court in Utah issued what looks to be a book-closing ruling in the long effort of one company, the SCO Group, to take over the open-source operating system Linux. In 2003, SCO sued IBM for a billion dollars (later raised to $5 billion), claiming that IBM had contributed code from the proprietary Unix operating system to Linux -- which violated SCO's copyrights, SCO said, because in 1995, it had purchased the rights to the Unix code from the software company Novell.

Got that? Doesn't matter either way, because Friday's ruling shuts it down. In SCO v. Novell, a case running alongside SCO's claim against IBM, the judge said that Novell never transferred Unix ownership over to SCO: "Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights," the ruling states.

What does this mean for SCO's claim to own Linux? The judge called a hearing for Aug. 31 to sort out what might happen to the IBM suit, but observers see the writing on the wall.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2007/08/13/sco_suit/feed/ 2 http://www.salon.com/2007/08/02/zonbu/ http://www.salon.com/2007/08/02/zonbu/#comments Thu, 02 Aug 2007 11:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/machinist/feature/2007/08/02/zonbu I'm typing these words on a computer that is not really a computer at all, and is instead better described as a desktop outpost to a cloud of data stored on server farms all over the Internet. This outpost is tiny -- about the size of a clock radio -- and resplendently silent. It contains no moving parts, and uses a third as much energy as an incandescent light bulb. The machine, which goes by the name Zonbu, is also stylish, easy to use, virus-free and, best of all, cheap -- you can get one for just $99. The price reflects an innovative business model, one inspired by modern computing realities: It's what's on the network, and not what's on your machine, that really matters. So you should pay for the network -- in this case, between $13 and $20 a month -- and you ought not spend much at all on that hunk of hardware on your desk.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2007/08/02/zonbu/feed/ 26 http://www.salon.com/2007/07/10/microsoft_china/ http://www.salon.com/2007/07/10/microsoft_china/#comments Tue, 10 Jul 2007 23:06:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/how_the_world_works//2007/07/10/microsoft_china David Kirkpatrick lays it on a bit thick in the current Fortune magazine paean to Bill Gates, "How Microsoft Conquered China." There's an obligatory couple of paragraphs near the bottom of the piece attempting to take Microsoft to task for getting in bed with the Internet-censoring Chinese Communist Party, but the gist of the story can only make Microsoft's public relations staff smile. Somehow, facing a market where piracy was rampant and the government openly pro-Linux, Microsoft turned it around. China, says Gates, will one day be Microsoft's biggest market. Yay for Windows!

For all those whining about China's cavalier attitude toward intellectual property, the key paragraph is Gates' admission that, you know what, piracy sometimes ain't all that bad.

Today Gates openly concedes that tolerating piracy turned out to be Microsoft's best long-term strategy. That's why Windows is used on an estimated 90 percent of China's 120 million PCs. "It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not," Gates says. "Are you kidding? You can get the real thing, and you get the same price." Indeed, in China's back alleys, Linux often costs more than Windows because it requires more disks. And Microsoft's own prices have dropped so low it now sells a $3 package of Windows and Office to students.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2007/07/10/microsoft_china/feed/ 5 http://www.salon.com/2006/11/02/microsoft_linux/ http://www.salon.com/2006/11/02/microsoft_linux/#comments Thu, 02 Nov 2006 20:20:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/how_the_world_works//2006/11/02/microsoft_linux The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft and Novell are getting together in an "unusual partnership" that will give a "boost" to Linux-based operating systems.

Under the pact, which isn't final, Microsoft will offer sales support of Suse Linux, a version of the operating system sold by Novell. The two companies have also agreed to develop technologies to make it easier for users to run both Suse Linux and Microsoft's Windows on their computers. The two companies are expected to announce details of their plan today at a press conference in San Francisco.

In addition, Microsoft won't assert rights over patents over software technology that may be incorporated into Suse Linux, the people said. Businesses that use Linux have long worried that Microsoft would one day file patent infringement suits against sellers of the rival software.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/11/02/microsoft_linux/feed/ 3 http://www.salon.com/2004/04/15/groklaw/ http://www.salon.com/2004/04/15/groklaw/#comments Thu, 15 Apr 2004 19:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2004/04/15/groklaw In the summer of 2002, engineers at the Chrysler Corp.'s research and development facility in Auburn Hills, Mich., jumped on the Linux bandwagon. For several years, the company had been running computerized simulations of high-speed vehicle crashes on a network of expensive -- and, eventually, comparatively slow -- Unix mainframes; each crash test would take days to compute, eating into Chrysler's production cycle.

The company's IT department, with consultation from IBM, saw that a "cluster" of Linux machines could do the job faster, for less money. By replacing its Unix system with about 100 off-the-shelf IBM PCs running Red Hat Linux, Chrysler boosted the speed of each crash test by about 20 percent, while reducing maintenance costs by about 40 percent.

Chrysler's experience with Linux makes for a classic open-source software success story. By choosing the free, flexible operating system over a proprietary system, the company saved money and time; the story would make a good ad for Red Hat and IBM. And that's probably why the SCO Group -- the small software company in Linden, Utah, that has been Linux's biggest detractor during the last year -- decided to punish Chrysler.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2004/04/15/groklaw/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2003/12/22/the_year_in_linux/ http://www.salon.com/2003/12/22/the_year_in_linux/#comments Mon, 22 Dec 2003 20:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2003/12/22/the_year_in_linux On Dec. 4, Darl McBride, CEO of the SCO Group, unleashed the latest of his periodic broadsides attacking the world of Linux and open-source software.

"There really is no middle ground," wrote McBride. "The future of the global economy hangs in the balance."

The SCO Group is the Linden, Utah, outfit whose yearlong lawsuit against IBM has riveted the attention of the software universe. The company has inflamed the passions of thousands of open-source software developers by committing to a strategy of tarring Linux, which IBM supports commercially and which SCO representatives claim was a depository for misappropriated Unix source code licensed by SCO to IBM.

Labeling the political philosophy and legal strategies of the free-software movement "ill-founded" and "contrary to [the U.S.] system of copyright and patent laws," McBride has been unafraid to frame his company's legal battle as an all-or-nothing crusade. His bold statements are a major reason that the SCO-vs.-IBM battle has dominated open-source news coverage throughout 2003. Looking back at the "year in open source," it might even seem that SCO was the only story anyone was paying attention to.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2003/12/22/the_year_in_linux/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2003/08/18/sco_ibm/ http://www.salon.com/2003/08/18/sco_ibm/#comments Mon, 18 Aug 2003 19:36:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2003/08/18/sco_ibm "There is perhaps not the same level of interest in this case as in that of the O.J. Simpson trial," says Gordon Haff, a technology analyst who's been closely following the multibillion-dollar lawsuit that the SCO Group, a small Utah software firm, filed against IBM in March. Cable news networks are not clamoring to cover every development in the complex contract dispute. "I do not expect to see it on Court TV anytime soon," Haff says.

But in open-source software circles, SCO's suit has achieved trial-of-the-century status. SCO owns the copyrights to decades-old Unix code, and it has accused IBM of secretly stuffing this code into Linux, thereby making Linux "an unauthorized derivative of Unix." To fans of Linux, SCO's claims seem at once preposterous and dangerous, and the lawsuit has set the community buzzing: The press (embodied by the likes of Slashdot and Linux Journal) is all over it, the pundits are in high gear, everyone believes himself an expert on the issue, and, like the best celebrity trials, the whole thing keeps getting curiouser and curiouser.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2003/08/18/sco_ibm/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2003/06/03/sco_linux/ http://www.salon.com/2003/06/03/sco_linux/#comments Tue, 03 Jun 2003 19:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2003/06/03/sco_linux If you ask Chris Sontag, a vice president at the SCO Group, how his tiny software firm decided to launch a billion-dollar lawsuit against IBM and became, in the process, the most reviled name in the open-source programming world, he'll tell you that the whole thing started rather innocently. Sontag says that SCO did not go looking for trouble with fans of free software; instead, trouble found SCO. In January the company, which makes most of its money from the sale of Unix and Linux operating system software, embarked on a routine review of its business holdings. And during the review, "we identified some concerns we had in terms of our intellectual property."

Specifically, the company determined that some source code in Linux had a lot in common with code in Unix -- and SCO says that in 1995, it purchased rights to all the original Unix source code from the software firm Novell. In other words, SCO believes that Linux, an OS that can be freely copied and modified by anyone, is illegal. Linux is, SCO says, "an unauthorized derivative of Unix." If SCO's accusations are affirmed in court, the millions of companies and individual users who have increasingly built their lives around Linux over the last decade might have to start scrambling for an alternative or face costly penalties.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2003/06/03/sco_linux/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2003/05/07/free_software_argentina/ http://www.salon.com/2003/05/07/free_software_argentina/#comments Wed, 07 May 2003 19:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2003/05/07/free_software_argentina My first clue about what was going on came when I peered through the window of the entrance to the office -- inside an exhaust-choked parking garage -- and saw a stuffed penguin sitting upright on an otherwise bare desk.

In a different world I would have seen a stylishly coiffed receptionist wearing a headset and maybe typing memos on a matte-black cordless keyboard while gazing at a matching flat-screen display. These were, after all, the offices of Argentina's Via Libre (Free Way) Foundation, an organization whose members are so influential in the free-software movement in Latin America that Edgar Villanueva, a Peruvian congressman, relied on them last year to draft his widely circulated "Response to Microsoft" letter. That missive detailed the advantages of free software so persuasively that it is credited with scaring Bill Gates into making a P.R. trip to Peru last July to give away $500,000 worth of computers loaded with Microsoft products to schools in that country.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2003/05/07/free_software_argentina/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2003/03/03/desktop_linux/ http://www.salon.com/2003/03/03/desktop_linux/#comments Mon, 03 Mar 2003 20:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2003/03/03/desktop_linux Sam Hiser, a technologist who spends much of his time promoting open-source alternatives to proprietary software, has an interesting way of describing the main difference between Microsoft's Windows operating system and Linux, its open-source competitor. "It's something I call the 'Windows pucker,'" Hiser says. "That's the feeling Windows users get when they're about to open a fifth program and they're so worried, they're clenching up their butt cheeks because they just don't want the system to lock."

Even if you haven't thought about it in such graphic terms, Windows pucker, or a sense of dread very much like it, is probably something you've come to expect from life. Computers -- whether PCs or Macs -- aren't perfect. Sometimes applications blow up. You'll try to do something complicated, like play an MP3 while you're opening a PDF document, and you'll inadvertently awaken some demon deep inside the machine, and you're screwed. The anxiety, Hiser says, is constant, a background stress that most of us don't ever quite notice and might think of as a necessary evil of the modern world, like a two-hour daily commute or PCBs in the drinking water.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2003/03/03/desktop_linux/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2002/10/31/taiwan_flag/ http://www.salon.com/2002/10/31/taiwan_flag/#comments Thu, 31 Oct 2002 18:44:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/col/leon/2002/10/31/taiwan_flag On Oct. 2, Chang Chung-Yen, a Taiwanese Linux enthusiast, was startled to find that his country had been erased. While fiddling around with the desktop interface included with Red Hat Linux 8.0, he discovered that no matter what he tried, he couldn't get Taiwan's flag to show up when he configured the system for his country and language.

The KDE desktop included with Red Hat has excellent tools for adapting the operating system for different languages, and Chang was well familiar with them. A programmer who works for a voice-over-IP company in Taiwan, Chang is a member of the Chinese Linux Extension project, which provides a suite of Chinese add-ons to GNU-Linux operating systems. He has also volunteered on a team that works specifically on adapting KDE for Chinese use.

He knew that when he picked out his country and language, a window should pop up that would include a small image of Taiwan's flag next to the country's name. And even though all the other countries in the window had their flags readily apparent, when he saw that Taiwan's was missing, he first thought he must have made a mistake. Maybe he'd forgotten to install some necessary piece of the operating system.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2002/10/31/taiwan_flag/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2002/09/26/piracy_unlimited/ http://www.salon.com/2002/09/26/piracy_unlimited/#comments Thu, 26 Sep 2002 19:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2002/09/26/piracy_unlimited Call it a strange case of quid pro quo without the quo.

Earlier this summer, Microsoft and China, two inscrutable monoliths waging a protracted cold war over copyrights and software pricing, finally decided to settle their differences via a three-year, $750 million "memorandum of understanding," the largest deal ever between the Chinese government and a foreign software company.

Details of the "understanding," announced in June, were both vague and open-ended. About the only overlap between both parties' descriptions was that Microsoft was supplying the $750 million and China was supplying the human resources. Still, given the background of the relationship, it seemed a safe bet that China's 92 percent software piracy rate -- second worst in the world, according to the Business Software Alliance -- had been a central issue during the negotiations.

Or maybe not. Asked about the glaring lack of a copyright enforcement clause in the new deal, Microsoft president and CEO Steve Ballmer did a quick Nixonian shuffle.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2002/09/26/piracy_unlimited/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2002/08/27/open_source_politics/ http://www.salon.com/2002/08/27/open_source_politics/#comments Tue, 27 Aug 2002 19:22:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2002/08/27/open_source_politics Walt Pennington is a tort lawyer and a member of the San Diego Linux Users Group, and that's about it. He's not an author, a politician or a nationally renowned free-software evangelist; Walt Pennington doesn't file copyright cases with the Supreme Court, he doesn't code, and he doesn't blog. A Google search on "Walt Pennington" gets about 200 results, a Nexis search less than five -- and every article is new, having to do with what seems to be Pennington's only claim to semi-fame: his recent idea that the state of California purchase only open-source software for its governmental operations.

Perhaps because of Pennington's obscurity -- his everyman, fed-up-citizen persona -- his idea is receiving considerable attention in the software industry. For years, open-source software programs such as Linux -- for which all the underlying code is made publicly available -- have been making waves in the software marketplace, challenging even such behemoths as Microsoft. One of Microsoft's biggest markets is government; California alone spends billions of dollars a year on information technology.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2002/08/27/open_source_politics/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2002/07/31/va_exodus/ http://www.salon.com/2002/07/31/va_exodus/#comments Wed, 31 Jul 2002 18:37:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2002/07/31/va_exodus In 1999, when 22-year-old Linux developer Michael Jennings accepted a job with the promising, albeit slightly obscure, West Coast start-up company VA Linux Systems Inc., he had no idea he would be participating in one of the biggest roller-coaster rides in Silicon Valley history.

"To be perfectly blunt about it, I had no idea what an IPO was or what stock options meant," admits Jennings.

Three years and $1.4 billion in evaporated investors' money later, Jennings can no longer feign ignorance. Like a farmer who has seen a tornado from the inside, Jennings recalls the company's historic first day of public trading with a mixture of bemusement and awe.

"None of us expected it to be nearly as big as it was," he says, drifting back to Dec. 9, 1999, the day NASDAQ investors turned Jennings and many of his co-workers into momentary paper millionaires. "I don't think even the president of the company knew it was going to be such a massive deal."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2002/07/31/va_exodus/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2002/04/02/stallman/ http://www.salon.com/2002/04/02/stallman/#comments Tue, 02 Apr 2002 20:29:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/books/2002/04/02/stallman In the fall of 2000, Sam Williams, author of "Free as in Freedom," sent me an e-mail asking me if he could discuss an ethical question about Richard Stallman. I had to smile. I didn't know Williams personally, other than as a journalistic colleague who covered the free-software/open-source software beat, but I could easily imagine what the trouble was. Stallman was being prickly, and a prickly Stallman is no fun.

Williams was in a jam. He had completed some preliminary work on a book about Stallman, including two lengthy in-person interviews. But the publisher of the book was balking at some of Stallman's requirements. Stallman wanted the book to be freely reproducible, just like the software that Stallman fights for with every breath. Stallman was threatening to withdraw his cooperation, and Williams was unsure whether he could morally use the material he had already gathered.

I couldn't give Williams any useful advice, other than to confirm what he already knew, which is that in the world of top-notch computer programmers, where stubborness is almost an entrance requirement, Stallman reigns supreme. He will not bend and he will not break, and if you want to dash your head against his rock, you must be willing to accept the brain damage that will undoubtedly result.

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