LinuxCon: Some advice from Uncle Dirk

When ASUS created the netbook market, its disruptive new machines all ran Linux. The development community welcomed this news, which seemed like a validation of much of what we've been doing all these years. But it did not take very long before Microsoft was announcing that the vast majority of netbook systems were now shipping with Windows instead. How is it, Dirk asks, that Windows is able to displace Linux on systems like netbooks?

Part of the problem, certainly, was the second-rate distribution which was shipped with the early netbooks. It suffered from what Dirk calls the "three click problem." When the system is first turned on, everything looks great. But, by the time the user gets three clicks into the system, it's clear that it is an unfinished product. Obvious problems - configuration dialog boxes for applications which do not fit on the small screen, for example - are everywhere. So it does not take long for users to feel that they have not gotten what they really wanted.

But the bigger problem, says Dirk, is that the systems installed on these devices are trying to be Windows. They are trying to beat Microsoft at its own game, and that is a difficult strategy at best. If the ultimate goal of a development project is to copy somebody else, it is inevitable that the project will always be behind its target. It will never be a perfect copy, and users will know. The user's experience will always be less than it could be with the original.

An example is OpenOffice.org's attempt to copy the "ribbon" interface found in Office 2007. It's already two years later, it is not that great an interface in the first place, and OpenOffice.org will not do it as well as Microsoft did. Suffice to say that Dirk does not appear to be much impressed by this particular initiative. Similarly, attempts to copy the iPhone in mobile devices are doomed to an always-inferior existence. There has to be a better way.

That better way, says Dirk, is to move past the desktop metaphor which was never all that great an idea in the first place. People who are buying computers now are not interested in desktops, and they do not really care about the operating system they are running. What they want is to join communities. So the most important thing we should be doing, in the design of our applications and interfaces, is to better connect users with the communities they are interested in.

[PULL QUOTE: Indeed, the processes in many communities seem to have the explicit goal of encouraging people interested in design to go elsewhere. END QUOTE] On the issue of design, Dirk made the claim that we have few real designers in our communities. Indeed, the processes in many communities seem to have the explicit goal of encouraging people interested in design to go elsewhere. One partial exception might be KDE; Dirk claims that KDE applications tend to be nicer because Nokia (and Trolltech before it) have put true design resources into the Qt toolkit. In general, though, we are not doing a good job of reaching out to designers, but we need those designers if we are going to create great systems.

The closing note of this talk was simple: listen to the users. And, by "users," he did not mean the people in the room, but the much wider user community that we need to reach.

Dirk's second talk filled a brief keynote slot; it was called "how to shine in a crowded field." The specific crowded field he was talking about was consumer electronics, which is packed with devices in search of customers. In this market, success is not something that just happens. There are, says Dirk, four things which are required.

The first of those is vision. There are, he says, plenty of visionaries out there, even if many of them do not see as far as they might think. We need those visionaries - just following others is, as was described above, not the way to be successful. Our community needs people who are not stuck doing things the way they have always been done.

The second requirement is competence - the ability to actually implement the visions. One of the nice things about the open source world is that competence is very much on display. We can (relatively) easily measure the competence of others, and our own competence as well. We are very free to learn from each other and quickly improve our competence.

Then there's commitment. Without commitment, developers will not see the task through to the end. And, just as importantly, users need to see that commitment. They need to know that the developers will be around, that they are serious, that they will respond to bugs, and that they will continue to carry the code forward. That said, open source makes users less dependent on the commitment of others. When a proprietary software vendor abandons a body of code, there is nothing the users can do about it. Open source software can be picked up and carried forward by others.

Finally, there is the matter of focus. Without focus, we will lose; there are simply too many distractions which can get in the way.

So how does the community do in these areas? We have visionaries, though Dirk would like to see more of them who are willing to go further off the beaten path. For competence, Dirk suggests downloading a random SourceForge project and looking at the code. That, he says, will make one question whether the open source community possesses any competence at all. Commitment, too, is on display at SourceForge - most projects there are inactive and going nowhere.

And focus, he says, is really hard. As a result, open source projects are highly susceptible to the 80/20 problem. The first 80% of the work is fun. But the task of actually finishing the job is less so, so it often doesn't happen. So we have a surfeit of 80%-done programs which have since been abandoned. We have, he says, 55 bad spreadsheets out there when we could have three really good ones. If we could stick to the projects we have, rather than yielding to the temptation to start some new, shiny project, we would be in much better shape.

Another example is the nearly 300 active distribution projects out there; it would be better to have fewer choices which were more complete. Given that, one might ask why Dirk's group went off and created Moblin - yet another new distribution. His answer (to his own question) was that they studied the available distributions and couldn't find one which they thought they could carry forward to a full implementation of the vision they had for Moblin. They needed to start anew, he said, to be able to commit to reaching the end.

In conclusion, Dirk says, the recipe for standing out is relatively straightforward: listen to the users, implement the whole vision, and go someplace where others have not been.