proprietary? anti-free? hmmm...

Posted May 28, 2006 20:34 UTC (Sun) by jabby (guest, #2648)
In reply to: SafeDesk Puts Bounties on STS Open-Source Development by ledow
Parent article: SafeDesk Puts Bounties on STS Open-Source Development

My guess as to why the STS "products" haven't captured a wave of interest is that they are commercialized versions of Free and Open Source Software. Of course, I know that there's nothing inherently anti-commercial about FOSS. The problem is that there's something inherently anti-free about commercialism, particularly the way it's being practiced here...

Allow me to quote from an article in eWEEK from May 30, 2005 (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1822061,00.asp):

"SafeDesk Solutions' updated SafeDesk Server is a thin-client software package that has modest system requirements, low licensing costs and lightweight architecture."

"SafeDesk Server Standard supports as many as 30 users and can be downloaded for free... Sites that must support more than 30 users or companies that need to integrate SafeDesk with existing domain controllers can purchase the $99-per-user SafeDesk Server Enterprise edition, which runs on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and comes with the same client application package as the Standard version."

"SafeDesk Server Standard edition LTSP models do not have built-in support for integration with other thin-client solutions. In contrast, the SafeDesk Server Enterprise edition provides built-in support for RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) and Citrix Systems Inc.'s ICA (Independent Computing Architecture) protocol..."

"SafeDesk Solutions works with customers to provide the proprietary hooks that allow LTSP to work with Microsoft's or in-house applications that would normally be difficult to configure. For example, SafeDesk Server can be deployed with CodeWeavers Inc.'s Wine applications for Windows-centric organizations."

"SafeDesk can run on most Intel Corp. x86 hardware, but we recommend a fairly robust server with capacious memory. For a 30-user environment, the company recommends that a server have at least one Intel Xeon-based processor, 2GB of memory, three 36GB SCSI hard drives with RAID 5 and dual Gigabit Ethernet."

I've included these excerpts in the order in which they appear in the article. Note the conflict between the first excerpt and the last ("modest" requirements?!). Note that the "Standard" edition is hobbled and you have to pay more for what we are led to believe are "Enterprise" features, like RDP support.

By the way, links to this article and another paired article were posted to the LTSP-discuss mailing list by a Curt Craig of SafeDesk Solutions on 6/7/2005:

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=ltsp-discuss&m=111816...

So, to pull all of the strings together, it appears to me that for all their talk of being complementary to LTSP, SafeDesk Solutions is actually using it to support a business model that peddles hobbled versions of Free Software to the uninitiated. These people who could be freely using LTSP itself and joining the wider community are instead encouraged to pay money to SafeDesk Solutions and pay no attention to that community behind the curtain. Moreover, SafeDesk Solutions seems to have no compunction about using the tactics of "proprietary hooks" and a tiered structure to divide and conquer their user base.

SafeDesk Solutions may offer something that people want, but they do not offer freedom. Like proprietary video drivers that rub Free Software advocates the wrong way, the proprietary BitKeeper that threatened to hold Linux kernel development hostage, and all proprietary, vendor lock-in-based "solutions", they may be flashy and shiny but they are not the way to freedom.

Supposed "improvements" like CIFS instead of NFS (if they truly are improvements in the eyes of the users) will make their way into the true LTSP to benefit everyone, not just those who can afford them. Wine integration shouldn't require proprietary glue... I'm sure the community can figure it out (probably already have). Basically, SafeDesk would draw people away from the community and that's bad for everyone.

The lack of a wild response to this "gift" suggests to me that the target audience for this software is savvier and smarter than was anticipated. They have learned not to settle for "not quite free"... not to settle for an x86-only, hobbled, put-up-or-shut-up environment. I say, more power to them!

I worked with LTSP for a while in its earlier versions (over 4 years ago). I haven't been involved (on the mailing list) in a long time, but I've followed the release announcements and cheered on Jim McQuillan and his cohorts with every successful release and advance. They recently released version 4.2 with redesigned local device support, swap over NBD (instead of NFS), udev, initramfs, and multi-head X support:

http://ltsp.org/

And they're not resting on their laurels... Last I heard, the current big initiative (Project MueKow) is to make LTSP more distribution-centric. It's hard to describe, so I direct people to their wiki:

http://wiki.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/MueKow

Oh, and LTSP is now part of Ed/K/Ubuntu, the most popular distribution(s) on the planet. Good luck getting people to pay for LTSP now...

http://www.edubuntu.org/UsingEdubuntu

Maybe SafeDesk should read up on the meaning of the word "ubuntu" and re-examine their relationship with their customers and the community.

proprietary? anti-free? hmmm...

Posted May 31, 2006 2:13 UTC (Wed) by jclinton (guest, #38092) [Link] (2 responses)

Um, did you read the comment to which you replied?

This announcement has absolutely nothing to do with LTSP, at all. We used to sell an LTSP product based on SuSE 9.3 but it is now retired. (It had an open source and an enterprise edition -- the later with a GUI management tool that I wrote through hours of tearing my hair out in the horrid YCP YaST scripting language.)

The announcement you are replying to is related to our Safedesk Terminal Server which is an entirely new "distribution" which runs on Debian Live; we extended Debian Live to support network booting and the patches were submitted back to the project freely. And, if you had read the announcement, you would have seen that we are PAYING the open source community to develop new features to be released BACK to the open source community: the so-called "bounty".

And yes, there are indeed two versions. As I say on the web site and in the included readme.txt file, the only differences between the open source and the enterprise versions is a GUI installer, management tool, and bundled VMWare Player (which is proprietary). Both the installer and management tool were written by me without links to ANY GPL software of any kind. They are available for purchase for the guys whom want to pay someone to do the hard work for them. If you know what you're doing, you're more than welcome to use the open source version. All the software included is EXACTLY THE SAME. The features are EXACTLY THE SAME. The only difference is that you can pay us to do the heavy lifting for you.

Also, commercial(ism) support is available for both version. But if you don't believe in commercial(ism) support, then I guess you can't take advantage of that ...

sorry! unclear PR?

Posted May 31, 2006 15:02 UTC (Wed) by jabby (guest, #2648) [Link] (1 responses)

I did read the comment to which I replied, and the press release above it, but apparently not closely enough. I did not follow the link in the press release to read about the product. That would have changed everything.

I had heard about SafeDesk recently somewhere else (can't recall where... probably LXer). I searched for relevant articles and found some. I made the wild leap that "SafeDesk Server", "SafeDesk Terminal Server", and "STS" were all the same thing. I didn't immediately see anything indicating that the new product was *not* based on LTSP. Being based on Debian Live does not preclude using LTSP. LTSP can do PXE booting, SMB, local USB, sound, and local apps, so none of that suggested that this was anything different from the earlier product. The "streaming video" claim made me suspicious of hype. If I had read the comment a little closer I might have realized that the whole unionfs thing implies something very different.

I concluded that these bounties were an attempt to get people to voluntarily hack on the hobbled open source version of a closed source product. I apparently made some hasty assumptions and I apologize for that.

Perhaps my misunderstanding is a better clue as to why people aren't singing and clapping over these bounties. The press release doesn't effectively distinguish this from the earlier product. (It also contains two grammatical and one spelling error which made me want to stop reading.) Including a couple of paragraphs from the website would have gone a long way to explaining what the "STS Open-Source Project" is. This might be a good way to make people more aware of your goals.

It would also be nice to employ consistent terminology. I see "STS Open-Source Project", "STS Project", "STS project", "Open Source Thin-Client Project", and "STS Open-Source Development" all in this short press release. The press release and the website also use the terms "Debian Live", "Debian Live Net", and "Debian Net Live" interchangeably. This kind of inconsistency makes it harder to follow and understand.

Now that I've reread the press release and the informative comment and skimmed your website, I think I'm starting to understand what exactly your project is. It is definitively *not* LTSP and it *does* sound like something novel and something that people would want. Since it is like booting a liveCD and runs everything locally to the client, it could indeed do fully accelerated and streaming video! Impressive...

Sorry for the unwarranted flame.

sorry! unclear PR?

Posted May 31, 2006 16:57 UTC (Wed) by jclinton (guest, #38092) [Link]

Thank you very much for your compliment. I agree that we need to be clearer about what we're doing and we'll try harder to do that in the future; thank you for that suggestion.

Much thanks,