The Linux Extremist

I could redefine the word “livid” today. I am riding on a lava floe of anger, bubbling and fuming with sulfurous rage. The name of my pain is MS SQL; and the cause of my fury is that it doesn’t play well with others.

My company’s website is in the midst of a transition; my predecessor, rather stupidly, decided that the company was going to go with Microsoft technologies and this has to be rectified as quickly as possible. Why? Well, firstly, it’s the cuckoo in the nest - my company is part of a larger group, and all the rest use Open Source technologies. Second, the costs of licensing as well as maintenance have gone up. As a result we are changing over, slowly; my company’s site is now a mixture of PHP and ASP pages. Some of the PHP sections call upon XML feeds generated through a query to MS SQL.

MS SQL is supposed to be an industrial strength database. Microsoft claims it “was engineered for enterprise data management for organizations of any size”; they also claim that their XML support “help organizations seamlessly connect internal and external systems”. Experience has now proven that this is absolute nonsense. There is nothing wrong with the feed when it works, but empirical evidence from the live environment has shown that the additional queries are killing the database server. The server is a well specified box, and should be able to handle the queries just as easily as it did when it was hosting the entire site. It can’t.

Fortunately, there is a way around it - I’ve told my developer to run a query every 24 hours which will take the necessary data from MS SQL and store it in a hash table in MySQL. The PHP code will query MySQL rather than utilise an XML feed. This change will reduce the dependency, though we will have to remember to run the chron job every time there is an urgent update and ensure that the query runs correctly. Overall, there is a silver lining to this dark cloud of a problem; the timetable for shifting completely to PHP / MySQL has been moved up a gear.

However, I am not soon going to forget how badly MS SQL plays with others, the issues this has created, the customer complaints and the sheer amount of pain that we are going through. I try to console myself with the thought that these are “growing pains”; we will mature from having gone down the Microsoft way to a point where we are doing things using proper Open Source tools. From my perspective, that day can’t come soon enough.

I have a book which contains cartoons from American presidential campaigns; among the most memorable is one from the 1884 contest which was between Grover Cleveland, a Democrat and James G. Blaine, a Republican. The cartoon shows Cleveland and Blaine with their running mates sitting in a pub and drinking beer. The legend above this scene reads, “We may differ in politics…but we agree on that.”

“That” at the time was Prohibition, a movement which was just gaining strength. Both Blaine and Cleveland were against it. This display of agreement was rather extraordinary, given the context. In 1884, one was either a Republican or a Democrat, and people would refuse to do business with each other on the basis of their party affiliation. It was less than 20 years after the American Civil War had ended, and to Republicans, the word “Democrat” was synonymous with “traitor” and to Southern Democrats, the word “Republican” was equivalent to “carpetbagger”. The 1884 campaign was particularly bloody; scurrilous allegations were made about Cleveland fathering an illegitimate child, similar smears were made about Blaine being corrupt. Politics in the United States has never been quite so polarised before or since; yet all bitterness aside, the leaders of both parties said “no” to going dry. It was a rare and shining moment of mental clarity during a particularly fetid political season.

It’s sometimes difficult to discern these moments of mental clarity nowadays. Watching the news from the Middle East is depressing because there is apparently so little of it to go around; war, chaos and violence have been a way of life there for as long as recorded history. And yet, weirdly enough, there is one relatively new way in which both sides in the Middle East agree; Linux usage in both Israel and the Islamic world is on the rise.

It’s a minor, cold comfort to be sure. It’s unlikely that there will be protestors on the streets of Damascus and Jerusalem carrying banners saying, “Make code, not war”. However, though they differ in politics, both sides agree on that.

A quick investigation of how the open source movement is proliferating on the web is an eye opener. I typed “Israel Linux” into Google, and found a very large, active Linux community, the Israeli Group of Linux Users (IGLU). Typing “Arab Linux” yields results which are just as revealing - the Arab Eyes project is working to make Linux more compatible with their language, and there is an active community site entitled Linux Arabia. Similarly, the Iranians are working on variants of Linux that work well with Farsi.

This is not to say that all these programmers intend to use Linux for the same reasons; they may agree on Open Source, but they differ in politics. There is no doubt that terrorists communicate through the use of Open Source technologies. The Iranian government may have some anti-Western motive in developing their own variant of Linux. However, in a strange sort of way, this is progress.

The Roman / Jewish historian Josephus’ writings indicate that in ancient times, the peoples of the Middle East could only agree with the point of a Roman sword in their backs. It used to be that the only basis for accord between these bitter enemies was recognition of the Red Cross and even then, the Red Cross had to be relabelled the Red Crescent in the Islamic world. Still, it’s easy to concur that one would like a medic when the bombs start falling. The desire for better computing appears to be the second area of mutual understanding. They differ in politics but agree that Windows isn’t the way to go. Two points of agreement in this troubled region in less than 200 years is utterly amazing.

This minor development should not blind us to the blood that is being spilled in the Middle East; generally speaking, it’s as bad as it ever was. Based on present conditions, it will likely be another century before a 3rd point of agreement is reached. But perhaps this is indicative of a small ray of enlightenment penetrating the gloom. As insane as the wars of the Middle East may be, at least the people there are not mad enough to continue to embrace Microsoft.

Government is generally the home of bad ideas, but occasionally there is an exception. The much-touted One Laptop Per Child project falls into that category.

The idea is simple: in order to help developing nations to leap over the obvious economic and infrastructure barriers which prevent them joining the digital age, a project was initiated to build the cheapest laptop possible; the target price is $100 per PC. I recall reading an article at the start of this enterprise, written by its director Nicholas Negroponte; he said directly that in order to achieve the balance of cost and performance, they were going to have to use Linux.

Promising indeed. The result is apparently a perfectly serviceable little machine running Fedora Core with a specialised interface called Sugar. Already, the governments of China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, and Thailand have expressed an interest. However, there are some hidden dangers within this project, and it’s unclear if the foundation’s management is working to address them: some of these countries have so many problems with corruption that it’s difficult to see how the project will benefit those it intends.

Nigeria is the easiest and most accessible example; they have placed the first order for 1 million of these laptops. However, it’s difficult to see what mechanisms are in place so that the laptops will reach their intended recipients. Nigeria has some of the worst ratings for perceptions of corruption according to Transparency International; they are ranked 152, along with Equatorial Guinea and the Ivory Coast. Furthermore, there is an existing digital culture in Nigeria which has a large, active criminal element. It’s rare to find someone who has not received an e-mail that involved what is known as “Advanced Fee Fraud”; namely, the scams that offer riches plundered from a dead West African official. A large part of this activity is run out of Nigeria; indeed, the leading anti-fraud website, Scamorama, refers to these criminals as “The Lads from Lagos”. In aid of this criminal endeavour, Nigerian hackers have left their markers all over the ‘Net; typing in “Mugu Guyman” (Nigerian slang for “idiot”) into Google yields loads of sites which these online fraudsters have used to harvest e-mail addresses.

Thus we should be concerned that the laptops are being sent not into the hands of children who deserve it, but those who will misuse this valuable tool. I emphasise the word “tool”; tools are value-neutral and can be used for good or malign purposes. A hammer can be used to build a house or to beat someone to death; similarly, a PC can educate and enlighten, or it can give the “Mugu Guymans” a cheap means (complete with wireless internet) by which they can perpetuate criminality.

The website for the One Laptop Per Child foundation has little information about how this issue is to be addressed; I suggest they should anticipate and ameliorate this risk before any of the laptops are shipped. Generally speaking, it is a brilliant initiative and an excellent means by which Linux usage is going to be extended. It would be a pity if this stellar idea was diminished by the mendacity of those in recipient countries who care more about themselves than the good of their nation’s children.

There is something deep in the British psyche that helps us to get accustomed to waiting. We wait in queues at the Post Office. We wait in line at Tesco. We stand and wait in the rain for buses. Perhaps the most elegant expression of this aptitude for patience is how we’re able to simply let restiveness wash over us, more or less, when waiting for a train. When I had to take the train to get to work, I was used to the idea that there would be a delay or cancellation; so were my bosses - if I was in late, all I’d have to say was “train”. They’d say “oh”, and that was the end of the matter.

I’ve noticed that this is not an American attribute. Whenever I go to New York I’m still astonished at how the “Time waits for no man” philosophy prevails, even if it does mean that one is risking death in one of their taxi cabs when it blasts through an intersection at Warp Factor 11.

Given the latest delay to Vista, I can only assume that Microsoft wants their users to become more British. It’s as if they’re telling us that the Vista train will be arriving soon, after delays due to signal failures near Southampton (the Bermuda Triangle of signal failures) and leaves on the line. Given the 2% drop in their share value yesterday, it appears that the New Yorkers on the Stock Exchange are still telling them to hurry up. It will be interesting to see what the result of this tension will be.

The investors should not be surprised that Microsoft is late. I was a beta tester on what was known as Windows NT 5; when I received my copy, I was warned by a colleague that it was a “bit of a dog”. Typical understatement: if it was any more of a dog, it would have carried fleas, kept me awake with howling at midnight and left copious excretal presents on the carpet. It thoroughly destroyed the test machine I used. I didn’t bother filing bug reports as it was difficult at times to tell where the errors ended and functionality began. In the end, NT 5 was so late that Microsoft’s marketing department could only put a happy face on matters by calling it “Windows 2000″.

That said, perhaps investors should be grateful that Microsoft has being delaying Vista’s launch; a hastily released product might be like Windows ME, in other words, it might become laughably infamous for being buggy and unstable.

All of this is good for Linux users. We can laugh at Microsoft’s timescales, because the delays to the last release of Ubuntu Linux were measured in weeks rather than Microsoft months, and Debian 4 is going to hit its target of being released by Christmas. We can laugh at Windows Vista’s claims of greater security, because these been blown to pieces by Symantec’s suggestion that it is going to be even more unstable than XP. We can laugh at the idea that Vista’s performance will be better than its predecessor as it’s clear that it is going to require even more powerful hardware to run.

We can also chortle at the fact that while Vista is caught in the mire, Steve Ballmer is making ridiculous statements such as “I want Microsoft to be in all of the good important big growth businesses in the world”. It’s about as preposterous a nation as the rail companies in Britain wanting to build cars when they cannot even get the trains to run on time.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the latest delay is that it only precipitated a 2% drop in Microsoft’s share value; given the proliferation of alternatives to Windows, you would think that investors would be less British, more New Yorker about Microsoft’s prospects. For the moment, though, they seem to be more or less shuffling about on the platform, reading their newspaper, cursing the delays. However unlike when a train arrives at a British station, all may not be forgiven with a sign of progress; when Vista turns up, patience may have finally run its course.

The secret police of Haitian dictator François Duvalier, known as the Tonton Macoutes, supposedly had a novel way of torturing their male victims. They would strip the prisoner, tie him to a chair, take a large nail and a hammer, and threaten to drive the spike through the unfortunate man’s scrotum unless he confessed to whatever trumped up charges they had in mind.

I remind myself of this unfortunate chapter in Carribean history whenever I get into a situation that feels hopelessly complicated or painful; the comparison always makes me feel better. My taxes can be raised, I can blow out a tyre on my car, the power can go out, I can even get injured, but thankfully, none of it is as bad as that.

In fairness, dealing with the fragility of Windows based solutions is not as bad as that, either. However, it’s bad enough that I am having to think about that to bolster my morale more often than I should.

I have dealt with the following scenario a number of times:

1. A server needs to be moved from one hosting centre to another.

2. The DNS entry on the server is changed so its Time To Live is set to zero.

3. The server is uninstalled, moved, installed in a new location and checked.

4. The DNS entry is updated.

5. The server is live again, and apart from minor hiccups, no one is the wiser.

I’ve worked through these steps with Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux and Windows servers; the only instances in which careful preparation has still yielded pretty awful results is with Windows. My most recent experience was involved just such a server continually crashing after a move of 100 miles from one data centre to another; a problem which had never manifested itself previously, suddenly appeared just by it having taken a quick trip down the road. Even with a group of Microsoft experts on the case, the best they could come up with upon examining the error logs was that some irrelevant files were missing. The files in question, the experts said, had somehow magically became relevant in transit. In the past few days, the server has improved, but none of the experts have taken the credit for the increase in performance, because they cannot see how they fixed it.

Much of the blame, in my opinion, should lie at the feet of the Microsoft philosophy of bundling everything into the OS; without tools being small and specialised, a complex series of dependencies is created. The operating system becomes a house of cards, and the tiniest shifting in a single element can cause its functioning to come crashing down.

Now I am in a familiar situation; I have to watch a moved Windows server like a hawk. My team of experts is monitoring it too, trying to find some rationality behind the server falling to pieces. At the moment, we’re still mystified. The only thing that is certain is that it will be an adventure, and any fix will have the feel of fragility about it; hitting upon an answer is just as much a game of chance as it is coming up with solid, educated guesses. Worse, if we have to make any more infrastructure changes, it is entirely possible that it will break yet again.

When Total Cost of Ownership calculations are made, it is rare that such maintenance costs are put into the mix; I laugh every time Microsoft claims a lower TCO than Linux because they always ignore real-world problems like this. Fortunately, I work for an organisation that is rational and businesslike enough to assess these issues. Not surprisingly, they have made a firm decision to move to Open Source at the earliest possible opportunity. I’m lucky; in a little while, I won’t need to think about the Tonton Macoutes to feel fortunate. For those who remain stuck with Windows’ House of Cards, maybe they don’t need something as extreme as that to make them feel better; but it’s unlikely that anything Microsoft serves up in the near future is going to make them feel good.

Dear Spammers:

Drop dead. I mean it, drop dead, the lot of you.

I am sick of receiving your crap in my inbox all day. It used to be manageable when I was receiving 10 - 15 pieces of it. I could laugh it off and say “What morons!” about anyone who would respond to your poorly written advertisements. Now it’s escalating to 30-40, sometimes 50 pieces of spam a day and I’m absolutely fed up with it.

Let’s make something clear -

1. I don’t buy drugs from people online; I go to a doctor and a pharmacy like a normal person.

2. I particularly don’t buy drugs from Canadian online drugstores. I’m in Britain. Canada is a very long way to go.

3. I definitely don’t buy drugs from people who can’t correctly spell the name of the drug they’re selling.

4. Oh, and I don’t need Cialis. Sending e-mails over and over again trying to sell it to me may kill my will to live, not make me want to buy your product; which considering the disreputable means by which you sell it, is probably nothing more than pill shaped chewing gum in bubble wrap.

5. I know that you’re trying to scam me when you offer me the stolen millions of a dead Nigerian dictator. Stop trying to pretend you’re sincere. No, really, I don’t believe you, you lying rotters. Shut up, do shut up.

6. I know that Mira, 25 years old, from Russia is not writing to me. I kind of figured that out since I’m not on any dating sites. Also the fact that I’ve been receiving the same message from “her” multiple times over the past week gives the game away.

7. Addressing the spam to Frank, Henry or Bill isn’t going to work either, particularly since this is not my name.

8. Using,”re: your letter” in the title is a dirty trick, but easily spotted.

9. The title, “You didn’t respond to my instant message!” doesn’t work either.

10. Nor does putting “Sexy housewife” in the title.

11. Nor does offering new opportunities for gold mining in China.

12. Nor does telling me to invest in a new stock; if it’s such a big secret, why are you blasting it to the known world?

And finally, offering me the chance to blast e-mails and join you, the Ring Wraiths (”neither living nor dead”) of the Internet, is not going to work either.

You are all wasting my time, soaking up my disk space and my bandwidth and generally making me extremely determined never to buy anything from someone who utilises spam to market their goods. Perhaps you don’t understand this, but you are considered the scum of the earth; when a spammer gets caught and punished, people laugh. When people talk about stuffing spammers in plastic shredders or putting them before firing squads, the automatic response is a smile before civility kicks in. There are endless seas of hatred flowing towards you; if they were to manifest themselves in physical form, they would sweep you off the face of the earth.

Do I expect you to stop? Not until your form of marketing irritates so many people that it becomes unprofitable. However, that day is coming. One day, spamming will become a relic of a barbaric past on the internet, and hopefully you will all be broke, living in a refrigerator box in a Rangoon sewer and eating phony Cialis tablets for the remainder of your short, pitiful lives.

I hope you all rot in Hell, and that Satan shoves large porcupines up your rectal cavities every day whilst you’re in perdition.

Yours sincerely,

Ivan Groznii

My parents are coming to West Sussex for a visit in October; I got yet another reminder of their impending visit in the past few days. Technology is on the list of things I have to prepare for them; they are both avid users of the internet, and can’t live without e-mail, even though they require my guidance to set up Thunderbird correctly.

As they’re both Mac people, I decided to try a little experiment and see how “Mac-esque” I could get Ubuntu Linux to be. Call it laziness, but I really don’t feel like explaining a whole new operating system to either of them; I love them dearly, but playing technical support does wear on one after a while.

Fortunately, there is a wealth of information about how easy it is to make one’s Ubuntu desktop into a virtual Mac clone. By far the best guide is at www.taimila.com; after following the relatively easy steps the blog describes, I sat back, astonished. For all intents and purposes, I was looking at a Mac interface…put onto the cheap desktop PC that I had assembled last week. Yes, its beige, ugly case was nothing to look at - but many of the main attractions of owning a Mac, its excellent user interface and reliability were in my grasp for a fraction of the cost.

To be absolutely fair to Apple, there are some niches in which it excels, particularly in publishing, design and video editing. However Apple is not satisfied with this rather small market, and is now trying to expand its offering to encompass those who are merely looking for an alternative to Windows. For those people, Apple is more Bling Bling than the Real Thing.

It’s difficult to be too angry at Apple; after all, the machines they build are very good looking and they also have had the good sense to base their OS on BSD. However the bling of Apple’s styling and OS come at a premium. A Mac mini with an Intel Core Solo, 512 MB of RAM, a 60 GB hard drive and Intel Integrated Graphics (which is absolutely the worst in terms of graphics rendering) costs £399. Word processing, Office and graphics software are extra. The desktop that I built with an AMD Sempron processor, a 120 GB hard drive, 1 GB of RAM and PCI-E graphics costs nearly £100 less, and includes Ubuntu’s full range of Office and Graphics software.

The extra price also does not ensure extra performance. It has been proven that Linux is faster than OS X using the G5 processor; it is also clear that it is generally more efficient on the new Intel based Macs as well. In fairness, the latter may have something to do with porting some Power PC processor based applications to the new Intel architecture.

Strip away the advantages of the user interface and performance, all that Apple has is a machine that looks very nice on one’s desk; in other words, all that’s left is the bling. One can say one spent an outrageous amount of money on one’s Apple and invite others to “ooh” and “aahh” at the slick casing of, for example, a MacBook Pro. It’s the equivalent of rap artists who used to drink Cristal champagne rather than beer just to show how upmarket they were; they obviously didn’t care about the quality of the alcohol, it’s just the status symbol and the money spent that counts.

Those of us who care about genuine value and quality have better things to do than buy pretty toys; Linux still continues to offer better value and performance than anything produced by Microsoft or Apple and still looks good while doing it. Those that produce hardware and software bling should be worried; one day the public is going to catch on; there are signs this is already occuring. Once that happens, easy to use, reliable and yes, stylish computing will no longer be the province of merely those who can afford it.

I once knew a gentleman, though I use the term in the loosest possible sense, who decided that the road to riches was paved with acquiring as many domain names as possible and then selling them on to the highest bidder. His initial investment in domain names topped at least £100,000; to my knowledge he has still to see a return on this investment.

This kind of mania for domains is mirrored elsewhere; according to The Register, EURid, the agency responsible for .eu domains, suspended some 74,000 names as they were being held by invalid registrars merely for the purposes of selling them on later.

One has to sit back and wonder at the sheer amount of time and effort expended to secure what is in effect, a rented commodity. No one “owns” a domain, per se, it’s just leased for a term from a registrar. It is a business which has a lot more misses than hits. Indeed, domain “squatting”, for lack of a better term, may be the most stupid internet business in which to be involved.

First, consider the risk factor. Not only are there responsible agencies such as EURid ensuring that domains are not used for nefarious purposes, but also anyone sitting on a registered trademark or company name is taking a gamble; they’re risking that the legitimate owner won’t sue, and would rather pay the squatter than the legal costs associated with getting the domain back. Sometimes this works, sometimes not; Tom Cruise, for all his sins, rightly chose the legal approach and acquired TomCruise.com off of a squatter. The other risk is that much of domain squatting is speculation; the squatter is taking a guess as to what domains might be popular in the future. The aforementioned squatter of my acquaintance took a guess that some companies many want a 3 letter .eu domain, and bought a great variety of them. Will they be necessary? Will a company want them? Who knows, is the answer.

The second idiocy of domain squatting arises from the difficulty of assigning a rational value to a domain name. It’s easy to do it when you have a domain name like “sex.com”; that is a rare exception to the rule, however. Contrary to popular belief, domain names do not necessarily generate traffic by themselves, if the list of hits on Sedo’s domains for sale is anything to go by. The 3 letter .eu domains may have a great value, or they may not: it is totally speculative and often times the real value is hidden as savvy companies will use an inoccuous proxy to negotiate for them.

The final stupidity of domain squatting is the assumption that having a proper domain is a key to a particular business. This is definitely not the case. A squatter may sit on a “booksforsale.com” domain, but does that make it more intrinsinically valuable than “amazon.com”? It’s not just the domain, but what one does with it that counts. A domain should be easy to remember to assist in marketing, but that domain necessarily does not have to have a direct relationship with the products and services being sold. Domain squatters often assume that this relationship is necessary; only in rare cases, such as the aforementioned “sex.com”, does this assumption pay off.

At best, domain squatters are an irritant and a nuisance; they are parasites who are trying to make a quick buck out of speculating on what others might do, rather than actually building a successful business of their own. They are hindrance, but not an overwhelming obstacle, and probably far more of them will end up losing money than ever make a fortune. One could tell them that the best way to make money is to offer a product or service that no one has thought of yet that could really benefit the community; however they’re too busy snickering at their own supposed cleverness for having sat on what they consider to be a valuable set of domains. Perhaps that, in the end, is their greatest stupidity.

AMD has long been one of my favourite companies. As soon as their processors became available, I was one of their early adopters; I was sick of Intel, which in my mind was equivalent to Microsoft in their presumption of a monopoly. AMD seemed to go against the grain; they were sticking it to Intel and producing processors that were on a par or better than Intel for less cost.

When I was recently building a new desktop machine, there was no question in my mind about how a balance of speed, adaptablity and cost was going to be achieved, I was going to have to use an AMD processor. With an AMD Sempron 3100+ and Ubuntu Linux, I was able to build a very fast, cheap machine that is going to give me at least a few years of computing joy.

On the other hand, ATI is definitely in the enemy camp. Their Linux support in my experience, though reportedly improving, is very poor. I’ve had no end of trouble with their proprietary fglrx driver, particularly using it with the ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 chipset on my HP Compaq nx7000. Every time I’ve utilised fglrx, it’s been say a prayer and sing a hymn time; I was lucky on my Savrow Katana K90 - fortunately the ATI card on that machine is modern enough for fglrx’s liking, for now, anyway.

The idea that companies which such divergent approaches to Linux are merging, therefore, does not fill me with hope. My first reaction upon hearing of the ATI / AMD merger was “Why?” Why indeed? Who needs it more, ATI or AMD?

Whenever a merger of this type happens, we usually hear the same management twaddle about “leveraging synergies across the range of brands”. I suggest in this case, it’s ATI that needs it more; the fact that AMD is buying them, not the other way around hints at this. We have not yet seen a really good answer from ATI to Nvidia’s range of high-end graphics cards, such as the 7600. Speaking as a system builder, I have had far better results out of using Nvidia cards than ATI; speaking specifically as a Linux system builder, I can attest to the fact the Nvidia’s support for Linux is far, far better than ATI’s. Things have gotten so bad with ATI that any system I buy or build in the future will be devoid of their cards so far as I can help it.

Can AMD turn this around? They have a good base from which to start: as for Linux, AMD’s support is rock solid. Obviously they need to find whoever is writing Linux drivers for ATI and tell them to stop writing code that makes people want to fling their laptops away like a discus. They also need to ensure the people at ATI are not adhering to a cynical philosophy which fglrx’s lack of legacy support implies; namely, that people should be forced to upgrade their hardware to utilise the latest and greatest drivers. AMD is also going to have to bring their spirit of innovation and value to ATI’s rather stodgy range. In short, AMD’s culture is going to have to prevail over ATI’s.

Creating a unified culture for two merged companies is invariably tricky; at first, there is always some difficulty in getting two different corporate personalities to play nicely together. Daimler Chrysler found it took years to get the balance right; in the end, assertion of Daimler’s personality was the best way. Hopefully AMD won’t take as long to realise they are going to have to assert themselves once they’ve stormed the corridors of ATI.

If AMD is able to do this, then all may yet be well. The fglrx driver may no longer be nightmare, and AMD’s values of reliability and value may become ATI’s driving principles too. For the moment, rather like when one installs fglrx, it’s a matter of hoping, praying and waiting for the reboot.

It’s very common among Linux enthusiasts to refer to Bill Gates as the “anti-Christ” or “Darth Vader”. I tried an experiment this morning by typing “Darth” and “Bill Gates” into Google. I got 432,000 results pairing the two together.

This seems unfair. First and foremost, Darth Vader is a genuinely entertaining personality and a master of the deadpan remark (e.g., “I find your lack of faith disturbing”), while Bill Gates is about as fun to listen to as an accountant on codeine reciting a poem on the virtues of watching paint dry. What is more is the Sith and Empire have much more in common with the Linux community than the Jedi and Republic.

I can already hear the howls of outrage from science fiction and Linux geeks from one end of the globe to another. “How dare you say such a thing?” they will say - “Microsoft is the evil empire, you’ve said it yourself, Groznii!” However, as a devotee of both Linux and the Dark Side, I can’t draw that conclusion.

Let’s look at the world of Star Wars prior to Episode IV, A New Hope. In Episodes I-III, the galaxy is ruled by the Old Republic, which is shown to be bloated, inefficient, and dysfunctional. Palpatine, while a Senator, says in Episode I, “The Republic is not what it once was. The Senate is full of greedy, squabbling delegates. There is no interest in the common good.” Anakin Skywalker states in Episode II that the system “doesn’t work”. No one disagrees that there is a problem. A large, bloated organisation corrupted by greed and uninterested in the common good sounds rather like Microsoft. This impression is only enhanced by the attempt of the Confederacy of Independent Systems to try to break away; Palpatine, in his role as Chancellor, reaffirms the values of the Republic by being unwilling to allow the Republic to split in two. Padme Amidala may wish to resolve the dispute through negotiations, however she too also does not express any willingness to see the Republic divide. This indicates a rather “closed source” system of governance; rather than allow systems to strike out on their own, the Republic’s politicians are determined to see that member planets adhere to a singularity, the sole question is how much force should be used to preserve it.

In trying to maintain this order, the Jedi are rather like Microsoft’s adherents; they too cannot see an alternative to the Republic. They also cannot conceive of anything outside their rigid ideological framework that might challenge their teachings; they cannot understand the potential of innovation or inspiration to catch them out. For example, Anakin Skywalker was inspired by love for Padme and married her; the Jedi had difficulty imagining that he would disobey their key tenets so blatantly, and it cost them in the end.

In contrast, Palpatine is a figure that could have come out of Bill Gates’ nightmares. He was one man, working largely alone, who had a new idea which was going to sweep everything else aside. Rather like Linux, the Sith idea developed underground. Rather like Linux, having the right apprentices (e.g., other open source projects like Gnome and Firefox) was key. Rather like the Republic’s problems paved the way for the Sith, Microsoft’s weaknesses created the opportunities which Linux has exploited. With a full OS war underway, it appears that Microsoft is losing, particularly in serving up web applications.

The comparisons run deeper. Once Palpatine won, he continued to show an Open Source sense of solving some problems. Rather than maintain control of the Galaxy through the Senate’s single bureaucracy, in Episode IV, Palpatine abolishes it, and gives regional governors direct control, thus freeing them to govern in any way they see fit. Yes, they have to adhere to an overall framework of Empire (which can possibly be construed as Open Standards), but there is no overall single blueprint for how each of these territories is to develop.

Palpatine’s farming out of clone troops to Open Source projects was less successful. Star Wars literature informs us that after the Clone Wars, Stormtroopers were drawn from a mixture of sources, clones of a number of people and non-clone individuals, as well as clones of Jango Fett. Unfortunately as Episode IV shows, new clones which couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn with 50 blaster shots were made en masse; obviously bug checking wasn’t strong enough on Version 2.0 of the Clone Trooper project.

The Sith and Empire’s fate also contain a warning for the Open Source community; they were at their best when innovating to bring down a bloated rival. Once the rival had been destroyed, some level of complacency crept in. While Palpatine’s plans were masterful, he was unable to foresee how the tiniest of elements, namely teddy bears armed with sticks, could cause them to come undone. Open Source needs to maintain momentum and a certain level of comparison to other models lest it fall as well.

Overall, however, the comparison between the Dark Side and those working on Linux appears to contain more commonalities than differences. Perhaps in future people will start claiming that Bill Gates’ thinking is about as backwards as Yoda’s speech patterns, and Linus Torvalds will step up to claim his Sith name; after all, Darth Linux seems a worthy title.