Paul Nowak

My recent switch to a single-boot Ubuntu setup on my Thinkpad T60 simply floors me on a regular basis. Most recently it's had to do with the experience of maintaining the software. Fresh from a very long Windows 2000 experience and a four-month Windows XP experience along with a long-time Linux sys admin role puts me in a great position to assess Ubuntu. Three prior attempts over the years at using Linux as my daily desktop OS had me primed for failure. Well, Ubuntu takes Linux where I've long hoped it would go - easy to use, reliable, dependable, great applications too but more on that later. It has some elegance to it - bet you never heard that about a Linux desktop before. There are many night-and-day differences between Windows and Ubuntu and, for a guy that does 80% standard office tasks and the rest of the time I'm doing Linux admin tasks, it was nearly all i... (more)

Plone and Drupal: Different Approaches, Different Results

Drupal Developer's Journal on Ulitzer Plone and Drupal are two leading open source Content Management Systems (CMS). Both were recognized in the 2009 Open Source CMS awards, run by Packt Publishing.  Both also have large installed bases and large developer communities.  This is made evident by some quick searching on Google: A search for LinkedIn profiles that mention Plone (search for 'plone site:linkedin.com/pub/') turns up 1350 pages-a large increase from 500 results in 2006. The same kind of search for Drupal developers turns up 9700 pages (search for 'drupal site:linkedin.c... (more)

Desktop Linux: 'By the Users, For the Users...'

The business world has never seen anything like the Linux ecosystem before. Many of us barely have our heads around the competitive landscape of the proprietary software publishing business with its near-zero cost to produce additional copies, complex licensing terms, huge gross margins, often changing pricing strategy, and a development strategy that varies based on market power as much as user needs. The software business is certainly not your father's Chevrolet. Then Linux and Open Source Software (OSS) come along and drop a bomb on an already complex competitive arena by addi... (more)

Microsoft's Source Code Leak - A Different Perspective

Read Paul Nowak's other recent LinuxWorld essays here. Microsoft’s reported source code leak of portions of the Windows NT and Windows 2000 operating systems today has the potential to be the best thing that ever happened to Microsoft technically. Think about it from the perspective of Microsoft becoming an open source company and finally being able to take advantage of thousands of programmers reviewing their code and suggesting improvements, discussing it, and becoming, dare I say, attached to it. Yes, this is going to be a PR disaster for Microsoft both from the angle of securit... (more)

Bruce Perens on UserLinux

Bruce Perens, cofounder of the Open Source Initiative and long-time leader of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, announced plans at the November 2003 Desktop Linux Consortium event in Boston to start a project called UserLinux. UserLinux is to be a Linux distribution based on a subset of Debian that will target large and small business desktops and servers. Bruce is currently continuing negotiations with his customers while also beginning to put the first broad brush strokes on UserLinux as a technology. A key aspect of the UserLinux strategy is to build on a solid open source s... (more)