Real Estate Investor Magazine South Africa July 2013 | Page 72

TECH TALK

BY RUSSELL BENNETT

Open-Source
Is Back
op
For Your Deskt

B

ack in the late nineties and early noughties,
when I was still deeply entrenched in
the burgeoning technology journalism
game, open-source software (OSS) was one of
my pet “beats”. Specifically, the drive to get a
Linux distribution capable of taking on the giant
Microsoft in the desktop space.
In truth, this was a favoured topic for many tech
journos of the time. And why wouldn’t it be after
all, as who isn’t interested in reading about a way
which could drive down the purchase price of new
PCs by R1000 overnight, without compromising
a whit on computing horsepower or component
quality. And the big-hitters of the Linux world
were pushing just as hard to make this happen,
for obvious reasons of their own. Until along came
Mark Shuttleworth with the Ubuntu Linux distro,
which still today is probably the strongest contender
for desktop mindshare in the OSS world.
However, despite all this media focus and massive
R&D spend, it never happened. Today Linux still
accounts for about 1% of global desktop operating
systems, or a sixth of what self-styled niche player
Apple can boast of OS X. Itself, incidentally, a
desktop environment firmly rooted in UNIX.
However, all that may well be just about to change...
This time, the drive is happening more quietly,
but with probably the only tech company capable of
taking the fight to Microsoft at the helm. Google’s
Linux-based Android platform has already
70

July 2013 SA Real Estate Investor

managed to establish itself as a dominant force in
mobile computing products, but while Microsoft
have been busying themselves tweaking and tuning
the latest incarnation of Windows to be suitable
competition, the Android explosion has been
quietly slipping the other way, and is now making an
appearance on otherwise conventional laptops from
giant ICT providers like HP.
That’s right, HP is producing an Android-powered
notebook called the SlateBook X2. Effectively
identical to the Split X2, which sports Microsoft’s
Windows 8 OS, the SlateBook enters the market
at 60% of the cost of the Redmond-based version.
And even more importantly, it doesn’t sport a
clunky, difficult-to-use and strictly-for-techies user
environment, but boasts the same sleek and friendly
operating environment which many of us are already
accustomed to using on our smartphones and tablets.
It’s an ingenious move, and whereas by the mid2000s I had realised that Linux in its existing
flavours was never going to be able to successfully
muscle-in on the MS-dominated desktop space,
in this Google-backed incarnation the opposite
sentiment is true. Driven by the groundswell it has
created in mobile computing, Android has more
than just a chance of grabbing a healthy slice of
this shrinking pie. In fact, if moving to Android
has similar implications for the cost of laptops,
notebooks, and the rapidly-re ceding PC, it’s just
about a surety that the tide will shift very, very fast
for Microsoft’s fortunes.

The flip side of course is that in Android, much
of the fresh-faced idealism of those old Linux
distributions is gone. Android is not about
freeing up your computing hardware to be used
precisely as you want to use it without the big and
bad corporate monarchy dictating what you can
and can’t do (and how many times a year they
need to be paid for you to do it). It’s more about
simply shifting the crown from the head of the
decaying king and on to the less-wrinkled brow
of a new divine leader.
Make no mistake, Android is still far more
open to tinkering than the Microsoft platform,
and remains at its heart dependant on a globallydistributed development model, but it’s far
more controlled and constrained to traditional
financial mechanisms than Linux was just a
decade ago. Maybe, from an ideals perspective,
not the perfect result, but without these core
changes the Linux market could never have
achieved what Google is doing today with
Android.
Proof, perhaps, that in the modern world, the
old axiom about there being “No such thing as a
free lunch” is a more ruthless and absolute truth
than ever. The days of idealism and free techie
love may be no more, but the fruits of this fancyfree philandering are just about ripe and ready to
fall where they may.

RESOURCES
Linux
www.reimag.co.za