An Ode to Open Source

OK after I finished setting up my new Vista laptop and got everything going (well almost), my fiancee told me to do something about a 6 yr old desktop collecting dust in a corner. Besides that desktop, we have 4 laptops. So while the old Dell desktop still can be useful for basic stuff, it was too slow and less productive compared to the newer PC's in the house. We wanted to donate it to a school or other non profits at first but lazy me kept procrastinating.

All our PC's in the apartment share one printer and scanner, the old fashioned way, by plugging and replugging cables. I tried turning on Windows' File and Printer Sharing, but then decided that it was too sluggish for the old desktop. I was preparing the PC to be donated to a local charity, when I then decided that I want to check out Linux and that old PC would be the perfect sandbox machine for me. So I downloaded and installed Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) on the machine.

Well, I was very surprised that the installation was pretty painless, considering my recent bout with Vista. Ubuntu recognized almost all of my hardware devices during installation and I was up and running within an hour or so. I was surprised that the old clunker now feels faster than even my newer PCs running windows. Applications launch and close in a blink and booting up takes only less than a minute. I set up file and print sharing using Samba, and it actually worked pretty seamlessly with my Ubuntu/Linux, XP and Vista mixed environment and felt much faster than Windows file and print sharing. I even went out and upgraded the hard drive, and make it a backup file server for our laptops.

I also got a chance to play around with OpenOffice and was quite pleased to learn that it is pretty compatible with MS Office documents and at a glance, I would think that for most users OpenOffice can be a good alternative for MS Office without the $400 price tag. I can pretty much do almost all the daily task I normally do in Windows with Ubuntu (at much lower cost). Well yeah, I wish that I can play games like World of Warcraft on it (actually some people managed to do it with some emulators, I tried wine but decided it might not worth the effort considering I have other Windows PC's at home).

The bottom line is I am blown away by the fact that all these quality softwares are available for free, built by an army of volunteer developers working gratis, collaborating from all corners of the world. I think sooner or later, Microsoft and others might have to rethink their business and revenue model. Linux has gained good acceptance in the enterprise and development world, but it was mostly in the back end, running database and web servers. But now I can see that some savvy mainstream consumer and business users may use Linux like Ubuntu in the front end too, running daily task like web browsing, email, word processing, spreadsheet, etc. using free open source applications llike Firefox, OpenOffice, etc. Actually Dell is planning to start shipping PC's preloaded with Ubuntu. I will be closely watching this development.

We have seen how the internet and especially open source community developed products disrupted many traditional business models. For example, Wikipedia has managed to challenge Britannica's domination in the encyclopedia world. Web 2.0 innovations that among others include blogs and blog aggregators like Seeking Alpha and wiki based community like ValueWiki are starting to challenge the business model of traditional Sell-Side Wall Street Research.

Well, I guess the world is getting flat after all.