Open Source: Economic Impacts And Current Events

The consequences of the current worldwide fiscal crisis on open source is a controversial subject with no shortage of opinions. Tuesday, for example, Slashdot showcased an interview with Red Hat’s President and CEO, wherein Jim Whitehurst predicted, "There is no question that open source will come out of this in relatively better shape than our proprietary competitors." Yesterday, that very same tech information and discussion portal countered with ‘Economic Crisis Will Eliminate Open Source‘, wherein The Cult of the Amateur author Andrew Keen opined, "The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some "back end" revenue."

Nobody can accuse Slashdot of being imbalanced, I guess. So which one’s right? Actually, I think they both make valid points…wait, wait, before you deem me wishy-washy and click away from this page, hear me out. Whitehurst focuses on customer demand…and as Red Hat is a profit-focused and publicly traded company, I daresay his competitors are as much the various free Liux distros as they are ‘proprietary competitors’ (translation: Apple, Microsoft, for-revenue versions of Solaris, etc).

Keen conversely focused on supply, i.e. lines of code churned out by legions of open source programmers. Even though Slashdot also reported yesterday that the Linux kernel just surpassed 10 million lines of code, those programmers’ mindsets are even more focused on income of late than normal (though I do grant that open source projects make for decent networking opportunities with your industry peers). And as I’ve repeatedly suggested over the years, even under the best of financial circumstances, open source advocates’ altruism and devotion to the ’cause’ have practical limits defined by pragmatic factors like food, clothing, shelter, medical care, asset accumulation for retirement…ahem. So ok, I guess I lean towards Keen’s end of the opinion spectrum. Whitehurst and his open source-enabled product peers might be able to line up plenty of potential customers, but once the supply well runs dry…

Regardless of where you stand on this issue (feel free to chime in with your thoughts), several open source-related tidbits from earlier this week justify particular highlight here at Brian’s Brian. First off, Google followed through on its promise and, coincident with general availability of the Android-based trendsetting T-Mobile G1, the company (not completely) open-sourced the operating system code base. While I don’t believe Android has yet integrated the Chrome HTML renderer and associated V8 JavaScript engine, there are likely plenty of other tantalizing bit sequences in the various libraries awaiting your perusal, adoption and improvement. And Chrome’s open source Chromium foundation can be found elsewhere, anyway.

Speaking of web browsers, a month-plus back I discussed the myriad improvements that the Mozilla development team made to Firefox’s Gecko nexus from its Netscape origins. These enhancements, among other things, were intended to make Gecko capable of being ported to power consumption- and cost-sensitive, therefore memory- and performance-limited, mobile applications such as Internet tablets and cellphones. As such, the Alpha 1 build of Fennec, Mozilla’s Gecko-based mobile browser, was unveiled last Friday. For those of you familiar with Firefox, the following picture of a fennec (thanks, National Geographic) will be an unsurprising extension of the canid theme:

Awwww….Fennec’s actually been available in a pre-alpha state for quite some time now, specifically targeted at Nokia N800 and N810 Internet tablets running the Chinook and Diablo iterations of that platform’s operating system (neither of which is available for the first-generation Nokia 770). Two weekends ago, I unsuccessfully attempted to install Fennec v0.8 (which brought v 1.9.1b1pre-2008923171103 of XULRunner along with it) on my N800. Neither program would install, and XULRunner even failed to subsequently uninstall. Fortunately, the gurus at the Internet Tablet Talk forum came through (yes, dear readers, yours truly launched terminal, ran sudo, gained root access, and edited a text file using vi…).

I haven’t yet made time to tackle Fennec Alpha v1, but Mozilla developers Mark Finkle and Brad Lassey assure me that the bug I encountered has been squashed. Feedback both at Internet Tablet Talk and via reviews such as Ars Technica’s concurs with the developers’ prognosis, but it also reveals that Fennec’s current public build is extremely slow (especially with JavaScript-heavy content) and stumbles with some websites. This is to be expected, according to Mozilla Mobile director Jay Sullivan:

Our focus so far has been on the user experience. We’re drawing inspiration from new ideas designed to make navigation easier and maximize the amount of the screen dedicated to Web content. We look forward to your feedback and will make lots more improvements to the user experience.

The focus now is on performance and responsiveness. We’re digging into optimizations, and there are performance projects happening in every area: the Fennec front end, layout, graphics, JavaScript, networking and more.

Best of luck to the Mozilla team; I look forward to testing iterative future builds as performance and functionality improve. And given recent-past (and plenty of previous) coverage from me, you can probably imagine how interested I also am in the following screenshots of the currently-still-private Windows Mobile compilation of Fennec, from Brad Lassey’s blog: