Twitter is a social networking platform that keeps you in conversation by allowing you and your friends to follow each others’ updates. The service lets users post and read 140-character updates, called tweets. With Twitter, you can do social networking on the fly, from your mobile phone or at your desktop, from a Web browser or a Twitter client. Twitter clients make the service more usuable by automatically checking for updates from your friends and allowing you to easily post your own updates. I tested four Twitter clients for Linux on a desktop running Ubuntu Hardy Heron.

Marc Fribush, a former “Microsoft guy,” is a telecommunications industry entrepreneur who discovered the benefits of open source when he launched a turnkey SAAS telephony business based on Asterisk. “It’s really powerful stuff,” Fribush says.

arla Schroder says she just “kind of wandered into” her current life as a free software advocate and well-known IT journalist. “I don’t have much in the way of formal education. But I’ve always been mechanically inclined – your classic ripping things apart and figuring out how they work. I think that makes open source a natural fit for me.”

Schroder didn’t study computers or programming in school. She found formal education “horrible and boring,” and says she couldn’t wait to get out. Once she did, Schroder embarked on a curious path that led to her role as the managing editor of LinuxToday.com. “I’ve had a lot of different careers. I started out as an auto mechanic, and that lasted until cars got all computerized, and then it’s hard to stay in business” because of extensive and expensive equipment needs. Next up for Schroder were stints in landscape maintenance and housecleaning. “I got bored with that,” she says. “I seem to last about six years.” Then she learned massage therapy. “I was getting beat up doing that landscaping work.”

In the early 90’s as a massage therapist in Portland, Oregon, Schroder found that most of her clientele were people involved in the high-tech industry. “They were all getting repetitive strain injuries. That was my introduction to computers. Before that they just hadn’t been on my radar. Then a friend loaned me her Macintosh LC-II. That was my very first computer. And it was fun. But there is something about the Apple way of doing things. I was like, ‘this is OK, but not really satisfying.’ Next was a Windows 3.1 PC. 3.1 was pretty much a fiasco. I was always dropping to DOS to get any work done. But that was more fun, getting under the hood.”

Carla SchroderWhile still a massage therapist, Schroder starting writing a regular column entitled “Happy, Healthy Computering” for a local computer publication called Computer Bits. That was the beginning of Schroder’s career as a journalist. She soon tired of writing about health and started writing about her newfound hobby: computers, and eventually open source software.

“I started gravitating toward Linux then because there were a couple of Linux writers at the magazine. I also started helping people with their computers – home users and small businesses. As soon as people know you can do anything with computers they start waving money at you. But [consulting] is stressful and demanding.” So Schroder focused more on her writing.

“On this one mailing list, one of the editors at Jupitermedia posted that he needed a technology writer. I was all over that,” Schroder says. “Michael Hall opened lot of doors for me. I’d been freelancing for various Linux sites on Jupitermedia Linux since 2002, writing nice gnarly Linux howtos of all kinds — desktop, system, and network administration. I also substituted for Brian Proffitt, the former managing editor and mastermind behind Linux Today and LinuxPlanet, when he took time off. Then Brian got a fantastic opportunity to work as the Linux Developer Network community manager for the Linux Foundation, which is the group that pays Linus Torvalds’ paycheck. So I said to the Jupitermedia bosses ‘Me! Me! Pick me!’ And after keeping me in suspense for a dreadfully long time — it was like days — they said OK. Which all goes to show how business networking really works. It’s not about going to events all full of strangers, and you wander around giving sales pitches about yourself and handing out business cards. It’s about looking for opportunities, cultivating relationships, and targeting the businesses that you really want to work for.”

Schroder says her new position as managing editor of LinuxToday.com is “pretty cool. I’ve been reading it since its inception. For the first time I get to read all the news and howto articles I want to, on the clock. It’s great. And I get to share the really cool ones with all our readers.”

Schroder sees her role in the FOSS community as anything but stereotypical. Instead, she identifies with other women in the open source world who are not your typical “hard core coder geeks who just want to put their heads down and not have to deal with people.

“There’s a multitude of jobs to be filled in the open source world that are every bit as important as the coding. People need outreach and need to know what’s available to them. I’m always into doing the hardcore howto’s. I take pride in not skipping over the hard parts — I don’t think there’s much point in putting out something kind of wimpy.”

Schroder says she admires FOSS hero Richard Stallman. “The man is brilliant. A lot of people don’t really understand how important and influential he’s been for the whole issue of freedom – the freedom to tinker is a good way to look at it. The GPL itself is a work of genius because it guarantees there’s going to be an ongoing ecosystem. People who take and modify this great code that’s been given to them? They’re going to have to give a little something back.”

Schroder hopes to take her message, that FOSS is for everyone, to the masses. “One of my biggest dreams, and this has been hard to do, is to reach out to a more mainstream audience. There’s all kinds of avenues for the geek crowd. The growth now is going to have to come from the so-called masses. I would love to find a way to get into more mainstream publications and start from a more fundamental level, to reach those raw baby beginners who have never had the opportunity to learn about Linux.”

The application is packaged for quick download (less than 4MB for the most recent stable version 1.0.6) either in a Windows self-extracting installer, a Linux RPM, a generic ZIP format, or in source code format. A beta version, 1.1 v6, is also available. Download your preferred package, extract it, and install it according to the requirements of your operating system. You’ll also need to have Java Runtime Environment 1.4.2 installed locally, since Thingamablog is coded in Java.

Right from the start, I was pleased and surprised at how mature and easy to use this application is, even the beta version. To create a new blog, click File -> New Weblog. An interactive wizard guides you through the steps. First, you enter the relative path on the server where the files should be uploaded. For my Web host, it is /public_html/directory_name. Make sure you give your Thingamablog its own separate directory, but don’t worry about manually creating it on the server, since Thingamablog creates your blog’s directory automatically during the file upload.

Click to enlarge Next, enter the URL of your blog, which is simply the URL assigned to you by your host, with the Thingamablog directory name appended. The application creates subdirectories for archives and images on its own. One small nitpick is that the program doesn’t name the front page of the blog index.html by default, but instead dubs it blog.html, which unnecessarily lengthens the URL. I fixed this easily by clicking on Configure Weblog -> Front Page and replacing “blog.html” with “index.html,” then re-uploading the blog.

The wizard next asks for is the blog’s title and description, categories, and site authors (and in the beta version there is an option to post via email). You can then select from several included themes, and configure the application to upload the blog files to the remote host.

Thingamablog has a limited set of features that most blog owners expect, such as the ability to generate RSS feeds, the ability to create and maintain multiple blogs, and automatically ping your choice of blog aggregators. It doesn’t include any special bells and whistles for automatic search engine optimization, and unlike WordPress it cannot use plugins, but if you’re fairly adept with HTML it is simple enough to add your own keyword and content tags.

Click to enlarge The only deficiency in Thingamablog that could potentially be a dealbreaker is that it doesn’t allow your site visitors to leave comments. Since Thingamablog is a client-side application, the files on the server aren’t writable. One solution is to use a free commenting service like HaloScan. The only other option would be to recode it to allow commenting on the server side, a feature that Bob Tantlinger, the original developer, hasn’t added, probably since it would change the basic client-side nature of Thingamablog. Not every blogger wants or needs to allow discussion; for such bloggers, not having a comment option, which keeps away a lot of would-be spammers, could be a benefit.

The most recent beta version of Thingamablog was released in December, and there’s quite a bit of activity at the project’s discussion forum. Bob says a 2.0 version of Thingamablog is lurking somewhere in the future, but even now, this application could become one of your favorite blogging platforms.

Bodog CTO Carl Schmidt calls it a “fantastic story.” In late 2001, the company was going through the “dot-com craze.” Hits were racking up, and Bodog was trying to figure out how to scale to the increased traffic. But Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), a Sun product, started bringing everything to a halt whenever usage spiked. “Every time we ran into a peak load, our system stopped responding,” Schmidt says. “All the application servers would stop serving requests. It turned out to be a bug in EJB that was replicating over and over.”

With limited resources, Schmidt needed help from Versant and WebLogic. “We didn’t have catastrophic load testing but we knew there was a problem. We went to the vendors.” The bug could have been either in Versant’s or WebLogic’s object-oriented database, but neither company was willing to track it down; instead, each pointed the finger of blame at the other. “We needed them to work together,” Schmidt says. That wasn’t going to happen, so Schmidt and his team went for the other option: they decompiled the code themselves. “We found the bug and fixed it,” he says. “And life went on.” But that was the beginning of the end for proprietary code at Bodog.com. “We looked at that situation and went, ‘wow’. [The vendors'] whole ad campaign is that they’re supposed to offer you this great support, but we were hampered by it.”

Schmidt started shopping for an open source solution. “We felt that if we were going to have to fix bugs ourselves, we sure would like to have access to the source.” He looked at Java Open Application Server (JOnAS) and Enhydra before settling on JBoss. “They seemed to have the most momentum.” So Schmidt began taking down the three Sun application servers, gradually replacing them with generic hardware running Red Hat Linux Enterprise, Apache, and JBoss, as well as IBM’s DB2 relational database product. “We used to use the stock Red Hat 9, but we’ve found that it’s been worth it springing for the enterprise stuff.” Regarding the use of the proprietary DB2, he says, “I wanted to go with an open source database, but at the time I didn’t feel MySQL was quite ready. Today is a different story.”

Schmidt says the migration was relatively straightforward, with a team of six developers that completed a change from WebLogic to JBoss and from an object-oriented database environment to a relational database structure in about eight months. The new infrastructure has grown along with the site, which now sits on 14 Web servers and a 30-CPU application server cluster.

“What’s ended up happening is that we’ve taken what we would have spent on licensing and invested it in JBoss development training,” Schmidt says. “That’s translated into higher developer productivity on e-commerce, which is the lifeblood of Bodog.com.”

The goal of Red Hat High is to use free software to introduce disadvantaged kids to technology they might not otherwise be able to afford, encouraging them to pursue further education and career opportunities. Red Hat High bundles free software alternatives to expensive proprietary applications on a Fedora live CD that campers can take with them to use on any computer. The program has been in “beta” for two years, according to Greg DeKoenigsberg, Red Hat’s director of community development. “The first two years have been good,” he says. “Lots of happy kids and happy parents.” He calls it a successful trial, but one that must “scale up” in order to continue to be successful. “We’re not in the business of doing small things at Red Hat.”

Camp is in session for one week in July, on the campus of North Carolina State University. During the day, the 50 Red Hat High campers learn how to create audio and video files, design Web sites, and build 3-D animations using free software like Audacity and Blender. The evenings are reserved for field trips to bowling alleys and movies and other fun activities. DeKoenigsberg says, “We took them to the Digital Circus, a junior college level school for learning the same stuff they were learning at Red Hat High. One of the students at Digital Circus was showing them what he’s learned. ‘This is a wireframe,’ he said, and they said, ‘We learned all of that already.’ Then the professor comes in and says, ‘Let’s show you some stuff that you don’t know. Do any of you know what IK is?’ And they said, ‘Yes, that’s inverse kinematics.’” Free software gives the children the ability to learn the same techniques and skills that college-level students are learning, at a much lower cost, DeKoenigsberg says. Maya, the 3-D computer animation application that students at the Digital Circus use, can cost $7,000. Blender is free.

Now that DeKoenigsberg has two years of Red Hat High under his belt, he’s ready to take the program to the next level. “There’s some cost to holding a residential summer camp, and it doesn’t scale as well as we would like,” he says. Red Hat can provide all the financial backing necessary to translate the program into something that can serve the needs of more kids. “We would like to develop a strong affiliation with some entity that can house the kids,” DeKoenigsberg says. “We don’t run a residential summer camp as our core competency at Red Hat. But what we can do is gather a community of developers and users around open content for an important social purpose.”

DeKoenigsberg hopes that the education kids received at Red Hat High can be translated into something portable and scalable. “We putting together a deployable curriculum in a box, and making sure we have something that is turnkey.” The lessons have to be understandable and usable by the average junior high school teacher, so that more than just a handful of children each year benefit from the program. “If it’s only going to be 50 kids, it’s not worth doing,” DeKoenigsberg says. “It doesn’t make enough of an impact. The opportunity for free software to change the way kids learn is too big.” Along with the goal of making a teacher-friendly curriculum, DeKoenigsberg says it is important to get some real world feedback from actual teachers. “We are developing the curriculum in a wiki style, so that teachers can change it directly. After that, the next priority is internationalization.

DeKoenigsberg admits there are some real world challenges associated with providing kids with a free software alternative. One of those is the fact that just having a live CD is not enough for a student who doesn’t have access to a computer outside of school hours. And even for those who can use a computer at the library or elsewhere, saving files once they have been created can be a problem. At Red Hat High, each student had a scratch space on the network on which to save files. DeKoenigsberg says one of the possible future projects for the Red Hat High community is to bundle the files on a bootable, writable USB key. “The cost of that will become lower over time.”

As the senior community development manager, DeKoenigsberg is used to the idea of building a community around a cause. “People are deeply incented to spread the goodness of free software,” he says. “And the educational market is strategic to people who care about the advancement of free software. It’s strategic to the company for obvious reasons, and to the community for similar reasons.” He compares the philosophy behind Red Hat High to his company’s involvement with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. “We have a very calculated social consciousness. OLPC is about getting that laptop into the hands of as many kids as possible. Red Hat High is about getting the understanding of what free software can do into the brains of as many kids as possible.”

Kuhn says a Lindows insider tipped the FSF off to the possibility of missing source code. Lindows insiders are those who have registered and paid a $99 fee to receive beta releases of LindowsOS and other non-public information. LindowsOS is a distribution based on the Linux kernel, which is licensed under the GNU General Public License. The GPL states, in part, that the program instructions in their original form as written by the programmer (source code) must be available to users of the program. The GPL also requires that users be allowed to copy, modify and redistribute the program freely, but they must in turn provide the source code.

Robertson does not deny that the source code for LindowsOS isn’t included in either of the two beta releases. “It’s a work in progress. We’re hopeful our first release will happen around the middle of the year. When we release an official version, all the GPL pieces will be properly distributed.”

Robertson doesn’t appreciate the negative attention focused on the Lindows project, likening it to “eating your young.” He says he is surprised that “some in the Linux community are quick to cast aspersions, with no facts.” Robertson points to his contributions to the Open Source community as proof that he has its best interests at heart, beginning with his career at MP3.com.

“We battled for the consumer at every step. We battled for open formats. We fought against secure music schemes. And we made contributions to Open Source software, since MP3.com was entirely LAMP based.”

And now that he’s working on making the Linux desktop a reality, Robertson says his dedication to Open Source continues. “We’ve joined KDE League at the highest corporate level. We hosted and sponsored Wineconf 2002. We worked with the project leader to identify the top 25 contributors and paid for roundtrip airfare for all of them, from as far away as South Africa and Norway, to San Diego. There was no registration fee. We also sponsored LPBN.org to broadcast the event.

“We’ve agreed to sponsor the upcoming Debian conference. Our sponsorship included funds to pay for an awards banquet for all attendees, as well as travel support for some. We’ve made a large investment in an Open Source company; we’ve also paid about a million dollars to get code produced … We’ve paid these funds to companies as well as individuals.”

And, he says, support for Linux and the Open Source community will also come by way of ingenious marketing. “If we can get to 5% market share, an ecosystem of healthy Linux companies will emerge which will be around for the long run. Look at the incredible things that would happen. Hardware manufacturers will ship Linux drivers for their peripheral devices, in the box. Computer stores will dedicate sections of their store. Major OEMs would ship computers with Linux. It’s a travesty you can’t walk into major retailers today and buy a computer running Linux.”

And while the code is important, that is not what it will take to get Linux to “20 million desktops.” Robertson says to help more people understand Open Source, better marketing and lobbying is needed. “And yes, battling Microsoft and their huge coffers which influence OEMs, retailers, politicians, and the press in ways you only understand if you talk to them personally, which I have.

“Hopefully, Lindows.com will contribute on each of these fronts, but it will take more than one company. It’s a shame that virtually every commercial Linux company has abandoned the desktop. Our goal is to build a company that will give consumers a choice for their operating system. At the same time, we’re committed to being a good corporate citizen and being a supporter of Open Source for the long run.”

Robertson seems dismayed by the FSF’s attempt to enforce the GPL. “No wonder there’s virtually no healthy Linux companies. The community seems to attack them when the real focus should be elsewhere.”

Robertson says that many of the critical pieces of GPL code that have gone into Lindows have been distributed back to the community already. “Where do you think that Codeweavers got their code for Crossover Office?” he asks.

A high level source at Codeweavers confirms that Lindows has indeed contributed an “enormous amount” of code to the Wine project. But while Crossover Office contains code that was created in conjunction with Lindows, it has also been built on code that was around before Lindows existed. According to the Codeweavers source, Lindows returned modifications to the Wine codebase only because it was persuaded by Codeweavers staff to return it. The Codeweavers/Lindows association was terminated in part because Lindows wanted to be able to keep its Wine modifications private.