LC Brazil: Consumers, experts, or admins?

Your editor had the good fortune to be able to attend the first LinuxCon Brazil event, held in São Paulo. There were a number of interesting talks to be seen, presented by speakers from Brazil and far beyond. This article will cover three in particular which were interesting as a result of the very different views they gave on how Linux users work with their systems.

Consumers

Jane Silber is the (relatively) new CEO at Canonical; she went to Brazil to deliver a keynote on the "consumerization of IT" and, in particular, its implications on open source. What she was really there to talk about, of course, was the interesting stuff that is being done with the Ubuntu distribution. Linux serves the needs of expert users very well, but, according to Jane, the future of Linux is very much in the hands of "consumers," so we need to shift our focus toward that user base. There are a number of things being done in the Ubuntu context to make that happen.

At the top of the list is "fit and finish," which she described as "the sprinkling of fresh parsley" that makes the whole meal seem complete. There have been incredible advances in this area, she says, but our software still has a lot of rough edges to it. Consumer-type users can usually figure things out, but it does not build confidence in the software. To make things better, Canonical is sponsoring a lot of usability research and working with upstream projects to improve their usability. Results are posted on design.canonical.com. Projects like 100 papercuts have also helped to improve the usability of free software.

Another area of interest is the distribution pipeline; the key here is "speed and freshness." At one point, that idea was typified by the six-month release cycle which, according to Jane, was innovative when Ubuntu started using it. But now a six-month cycle is far too slow; the example we need to be emulating now is, instead, the Apple App Store. Apple's distribution mechanism would be rather less popular if it only got new software every six months. The Ubuntu Software Store has been set up in an attempt to create a similar mechanism for Ubuntu users. It will provide much quicker application updates and - of course - the ability for users to purchase software.

The end result of all this work is intended to be a "fit, finished, fresh pipeline" of software, creating "a wave of code that consumers can surf on top of." This may not be quite the way that most LWN readers think about their use of Linux, but it may yet prove to be an approach which brings Linux to a whole new community of users.

Experts

Vinod Kutty represents a very different type of consumer: the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, whose Linux-based trading platform moves unimaginable amounts of money around every day. His talk covered the Exchange's move to Linux, which began in 2003. There was a fair amount of discussion of performance benefits and cost savings, but the interesting part of the talk had to do with how Linux changed the way that the Exchange deals with its software and its suppliers. According to Vinod, we have all become used to buying things that we don't understand, but open source changes that.

He described an episode where a proprietary Unix system was showing unwanted latencies under certain workloads. With the Unix system, the only recourse was to file a support request with the vendor, then wait until it got escalated to a level where somebody might just be able to fix it. With an enterprise Linux distribution, the support request is still made, but the waiting time is no longer idle. Instead, they can be doing their own investigation of the problem, looking for reports of similar issues on the net or going directly into the source. Chances are good that the problem can be nailed down before the vendor gets back with an answer.

A related issue is that of quality assurance and finding bugs. According to Vinod, we are all routinely performing QA work for our vendors. The difference with Linux is that any time spent chasing down problems benefits the community as a whole; it also benefits CME when the fix comes back in future releases.

Linux, Vinod said, has become the "Wikipedia of operating systems"; it is a store of knowledge on how systems should be built. Taking full advantage of that knowledge requires building up a certain amount of in-house expertise. But having that expertise greatly reduces the risk of catastrophic problems; depending on outside vendors, instead, increases that risk. The value of open source is that it allows us to move beyond being consumers and know enough about our systems to take responsibility for keeping them working.

Administrators

Once upon a time, it seemed like it was simply not possible to run a Linux-related conference without Jon 'Maddog' Hall in attendance. Unfortunately, we don't see as much of Maddog as we used to; one reason for that is that he has been busy working on schemes in Brazil. One of those is Project Cauã. Maddog cannot be faulted for lack of ambition: he hopes to use Linux in a plan to create millions of system administration jobs, reduce energy use, and increase self-sufficiency in Brazilian cities.

Maddog has long been critical of the One Laptop Per Child project which, he says, is targeting children who are too young, too poor, and too far from good network access. He sees a group which can benefit more from direct help: children living in large cities in countries like Brazil. These kids live in a dense environment where network access is possible. They also live in an environment where many people and businesses have computers, but they generally lack the expertise to keep those computers working smoothly. The result is a lot of frustration and lost time.

The idea behind Project Cauã is to put those kids to work building a better computing infrastructure and supporting its ongoing operation. In essence, Maddog would like to create an array of small, independent Internet service provider businesses, each serving one high-rise building. The first step is training the people - older children - who will build and run those businesses. They are to be trained in Linux system administration skills, of course, but also in business management skills: finding customers, borrowing money, etc. The training will mostly be delivered electronically, over the net or, if necessary, via DVD.

These new businesspeople will then go out to deliver computing services to their areas. There is a whole network architecture being designed to support these services, starting with thin client systems to put into homes or businesses. The idea behind these systems is that they have no moving parts, so they are quiet and reliable. They can be left on all the time, making them far more useful. Maddog is working with a São Paulo university to design these thin clients, with the plan of releasing the designs so that any of a number of local businesses can manufacture them. Despite equipping these systems with some nonstandard features - a digital TV tuner and a femtocell cellular modem, for example - Maddog thinks they can be built for less than $100 each.

The project envisions that each building would have an incoming network link from a wholesale ISP and at least one local server system. Three sizes of servers are planned, with the smallest one being made of two thin clients tied together. These servers will run a local wireless network and will be tied into a city-wide mesh network as well. Applications will generally run in virtual machines - on either the client or the server - and will all use encrypted communications and storage.

Project Cauã trainees will be able to buy the equipment using loans underwritten by the project itself; they then should be able to sell network access and support services to the tenants of the buildings they cover. If all goes according to plan, this business should generate enough money to pay off the loans and provide a nice income. Unlike the OLPC program which, according to Maddog, has a ten-year payoff time at best, Project Cauã will be able to turn a Brazilian city kid into a successful businessperson within two years.

A project like this requires some funding to get off the ground. It seems that Brazil has a law requiring technical companies to direct 4% of their revenue toward fast development projects. Project Cauã qualifies, and, evidently, a number of (unnamed) companies have agreed to send at least some of their donations in that direction. With funds obtained in this way, Maddog is able to say that the project is being launched with no government money at all.

This project is still in an early state; the computer designs and training materials do not yet exist. Some people have expressed doubts as to whether the whole thing is really feasible. But one cannot deny that it is an interesting vision of the use of free software to make life better for Brazilian city dwellers while creating many thousands of small businesspeople who understand the technology and are able to manage it locally. This is not "cloud computing," where resources are pulled back to distant data centers. It is local computing, with the people who understand and run it in the same building.

Linux is being pushed in a lot of different directions for a wide variety of users. Beyond doubt, there will be people out there who want to deal with Linux-based systems in a pure "consumer" mode. For them, Linux differs little from any other operating system. Others, though, want to dig more deeply into the system and understand it better so that they can fix their own problems or run it in the way that suits them best - or empower others to do the same. Linux, it seems, is well placed to serve all of these different classes of users.

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