SuitWatch -- December 30, 2006

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How to build the Linux Box For Everybody in 2007

Time Magazine closed 2006 by naming You its Person of the Year: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html. The subhead exclaimed, "Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world."

Not so fast.

Allow me to present some evidence to the contrary before making an affirmative claim that Time will be right one year from now - when we have a popular Linux laptop.

First, go read A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection, by Peter Gutmann: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt. The piece is chock full of juicy pull-quotes, topmost of which is its Executive Executive Summary: "The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history." The public sources he sites are appended below.

Seems Vista's "content protection" requirements will force hardware makers to do several awful things at once, mostly by burning DRM into hardware. Needless to say, this will screw up things for Linux's customary hermit-crab approach to running on generic hardware. Because, if Microsoft succeeds, there won't be generic hardware. White boxes won't be able to run Vista. They'll only run Vista's ancestors and competitors. Vista-ready boxes will be white in the manner of Apple's: in color only.

For those of us old enough to remember, this approach calls to mind IBM's suicidal Microchannel bus, back in the late 80s. Microchannel was a PC backplane lock-in strategy that rode to market inside a Trojan Horse of improvements over the aging PC (ISA) bus. The Microchannel horse was transparent as well as lame, and the market didn't buy it. Instead the market eventually bought the PCI bus, which was open and useful for everybody.

Microsoft hides its hardware lock-in strategy inside a transparent Trojan Horse of "protection" for "premium content". As we know, "premium content" is produced mostly by the entertainment industry. Not by You. Thus the Vista Content Protection spec is a kiss for Hollywood and a fart for everybody else.

For more on the whole mess, follow links from Windows Vista: Suicide notes, nerdcore rap MP3 http://www.boingboing.net/2006/12/24/windows_vista_suicid.html, at BoingBoing.

Next, go read World Domination 201 http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/world-domination-201.html, by Eric S. Raymond and Rob Landley. Basically, they say 64-bit computing is a wide-open race. "What will replace 32 bit Windows as the next dominant OS has yet to be decided", they say. Also, "The three contenders for the new 64-bit standard are Windows-64, MacOS X, and Linux. The winner will be determined by desktop market share, the bulk of which consists of non-technical end users."

In other words, it's ours to win. And by 'ours' I don't mean just the Linux community. We're talking about everybody here. Because none of us - not even our non-technical brethren - wants to be locked into a vendor silo. And the only one of those three contenders that isn't a vendor is Linux.

Eric and Rob list some of the Things That Need To Be Done if Linux wins this thing for the rest of us. Whether they're right or wrong on the particulars isn't at issue here. What's at issue is a functioning marketplace where You really are in charge.

What will it take to make that happen?

The answer has to come from customers, and work for both customers and vendors. It has to work equally well for the demand and the supply sides of market relationships.

Vendors have something meant for that today. It's called "Customer Relationship Management", or CRM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_Relationship_Management. The problem is, CRM doesn't relate. Instead it calls you at dinner, in hope that you might fall for a sales pitch some minimum-wage worker reads you from a script. CRM is what sends you junk mail. CRM is what puts you through sign-up and sign-on wringers when all you want is to find a few facts on a website. CRM is why so many companies are completely clueless about what ought to be obvious about what customers actually want. Or what the market actually needs. I submit Microsoft's "premium content protection" crap as Exhibit A. Chances are CRM is not directly involved, but the mentality behind it is just the same. It's fully disengaged from customers.

We can't turn CRM around, but we can give it something better than the nearly-nothing they're relating to right now. That something is the reciprocal of CRM, which is VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management. VRM is a customer toolset for independence and engagement. It's what works across vendors -- even across silos in ways that work for both customers AND vendors.

Bottom line, it fixes broken markets by providing customers with more freedom to engage vendors in ways that actually work.

Efforts toward VRM are taking shape at Project VRM http://projectvrm.org/, which I've been putting together as part of my work as a fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. (Berkman has also incubated Creative Commons, Global Voices, podcasting and many other worthy efforts.) I want Project VRM to pick up the gauntlet that Eric and Rob have thrown down, and accelerate efforts toward an earlier deadline: the end of 2007.

Here's the key: users need to be involved. Users need to give developers the input they need to start specifying the Linux boxes that hardware vendors will build alongside, or instead of, Vista boxes. These new boxes need to address actual customer demand, and serve customers in ways that put both Apple and Microsoft to shame.

I don't think it should be that hard to do. While Apple and Microsoft play kissy with Hollywood, let's kick them both in the ass by making something better that works for everybody. Including all the hardware vendors and all the third parties and all the customers who stand to benefit.

Lets build a free and open marketplace for the gear we want.

And let's just start with computers. Then lets fan out to fix the rest of consumer electronics as well. And every other networked market after that.

It's about time, no?

-- Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal, a Visiting Scholar with the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara, and a Fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

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