Yet, they remain a luxury or an unknown entity to the bulk of mobile phone users. Products such as the iPhone and Samsung’s flagship range of Android phones are positioned as high-end products with a corresponding price tag. Many a person whom I’ve talked to about a smartphone still give the excuse that it’s too expensive for them. Cheap smartphones, such as the China-made knock-offs that mimic popular smartphone models in terms of hardware design, are often poorly equipped in terms of software. I’ve had some hands-on experience with iPhone and Blackberry knock-offs and I’ve come to the conclusion that they simply cannot be labelled as smartphones due to the lack of the software features expected from a smartphone.

This barrier to creating cheap smartphones stems from the fact that a good mobile operating system is not a trivial matter. Many smaller phone manufacturers just do not have the resources to create their own operating systems from scratch. Enter operating systems that are provided by third parties. For some time, we have had several independent entities providing generic operating systems for mobile devices. Microsoft’s Windows Mobile is probably one of the earliest such operating systems. Unfortunately, due to the fact that licensing for Windows Mobile is a significant cost factor and that its phones were relatively poorly implemented compared to other smartphone vendors, it never reached the market penetration needed to turn smartphones into a commodity.

Enter OpenSource then. Having an OpenSource operating system may constitute significant cost savings for any phone manufacturer hoping to enter the smartphone market. There are basically two strong contenders in this category: Symbian and Android. Symbian has had a relatively long history and is currently used mainly in Nokia phones and by a handful of other manufacturers. At this point of time, however, it is rapidly losing market share and its future is frankly in doubt. Any phone manufacturer looking to integrate an OpenSource operating system into their device would probably have strong doubts in its future viability.

Enter Android. A product of the search behemoth Google and a critical component of the Open Handset Alliance, it has recently been seeing huge gains in terms of market growth and interest from phone manufacturers. It already has major manufacturers such as Motorola, HTC, Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson backing it and manufacturing devices running it (i.e. not vaporware). However, as I said earlier, the current crop of Android devices tend to be positioned as high to middle tier products.

Enter the low cost manufacturers. I’ve been reading reports of more and more small phone manufacturers getting into the Android game:

• CSL, a Malaysian company known more for their range of Blackberry knock-offs, has recently come out with their first Android model.
• After the Apple iPad was launched, there was predictably a flurry of Chinese knock-offs, just like there was for the iPhone. But this time round, the knock-offs were running Android!!!

This is a significant step. While previously, cheap mobile devices often meant crappy software loaded inside, with Android, what you’re getting is probably just as good as you can get with any other manufacturer. Sure, you’ll probably be limited by crappy hardware, but the basic features of what I expect of a smartphone will be there. I do not need a top-of-the-line AMOLED or SLCD screen to view my calendar. I do not need a Snapdragon or Hummingbird CPU to check my email. All I need for it is to be decently made and cheap.

If I were to lose my Nexus One right now, I probably won’t be able to afford to replace it with a new top-of-the-line gadget. What this meant previously, was that I needed to downgrade myself to a non-smartphone and tough it up until I can afford one. However, with cheaper options running Android, I can switch to a lesser known brand and have basically most of the features I’m used to until I save up enough for one of ‘em dual core, dedicated GPU devices that are purportedly coming soon. I probably won’t be able to play Asphalt 5 anymore, but that’s not too much of a sacrifice. I can live without a few games, but I cannot live without having instant access to my emails.

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The Dream’s shelf life has been extended time and again, thanks to the efforts of Steve Kondik and his cohort. Their CyanogenMod releases have time and again ensured that the Dream is kept relevant, despite the dozens of new Android models we see announced every week. As of July 11th, the Dream has been given yet another new lease on life with the release candidate announcement of CyanogenMod 6, the CyanogenMod community’s port of Android 2.2 (Froyo).

I was so eager to get my Dream updated to CM6 RC1 that I rushed over yesterday evening to his office and squatted outside the building doing the upgrade. At this time, my Dream was running CyanogenMod 5.0.7. I didn’t have a chance to upgrade it to 5.0.8 as I’d been too busy to meet my brother for a while. Turned out that this caused a fair amount of drama during my upgrading efforts.

I’ve been using ROM Manager for the past month or so and it really has been a time-saver for me. Naturally, the moment I laid hands on the Dream, I downloaded ROM Manager from Market and installed it. Using ROM Manager, I installed the ClockWorkMod recovery image, overwriting the AmonRA recovery image that was previously installed. I then proceeded to download CM6 RC1 and the bundled Google apps FRF91 using ROM Manager.

At this point of time, I was smugly smiling to myself at how cool this process was. There I was, literally squatting at the sidewalk, doing an OS upgrade on my phone over 3G with no need to hook it up to a laptop or PC. That’s why I’ve said before that one of the reasons I love Android is that it’s a full-fledged peer to a PC and not just a slave to it.

After downloading the necessary files, I was prompted to select whether a backup and/or wipe should be done or not. ROM Manager then rebooted the Dream into recovery mode to complete the upgrade. Or at least that was what it was supposed to do. 3 minutes after rebooting, I was staring in alarm at the Dream stuck at the bootloader splash image. It just would not go into recovery anymore. I rebooted the phone normally and found that it still could boot into CyanogenMod 5.0.7 with no apparent issues.

After some panicky checks on the Internet, I found that CyanogenMod 5.0.7 has problems writing a recovery image, as was warned in AmonRA’s release page. Suffice to say, if you’re running 5.0.7, you cannot use it to flash your recovery image. Meh to me for not reading up adequately before doing the upgrade.

I resolved the problem by re-flashing AmonRA using fastboot as documented here. Just boot the phone into fastboot mode by holding the camera and power button simultaneously, hook it up to a laptop (yes, this is where a PC or laptop is required) and run the command “fastboot flash recovery <path to recovery image>“. Huge sighs of relief all around when I saw the familiar recovery menu items upon rebooting.

So, I proceeded to manually flash CM6 RC1 and FRF91. At first, I did not do a wipe, hoping that the upgrade from CM5 to CM6 would no necessitate this. No dice. When I rebooted the phone, I found that the whole Google account sync module was not working and I could not even add a Google account! Oh well, didn’t really have high hopes for this anyway. So I wiped the phone and then everything worked fine. It’s definitely a pain to get the phone back into an operating condition you’re used to after a wipe so I really hope that something can be done about it in the final release. I have no idea whether it’s technically possible or not so I won’t complain, I’ll just hope.

My impressions on the Dream running CM6 / Froyo: it’s noticeably faster than Eclair, but really, don’t get your hopes up too high. The Dream’s problem is with its lack of RAM. It has only 96MB of available RAM compared to 386MB on my Nexus One. The moment you switch applications, the odds of it having to be loaded from internal memory or SD card is very high and that imposes an overhead on performance. This will happen no matter what kind of swap to SD card hacks are done and it’s really pointless to hope for more. I’m just glad that my Dream is able to run the latest and greatest software when the manufacturer has long lost any interest in keeping it updated.

Kudos to the CyanogenMod team for their great work. Given that Gingerbread seems to be designed for higher CPU speeds than ever, I’m not sure whether we’ll see a CM7 for the Dream but one can always dream, no?

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NOTE: As the “alpha” tag indicates, this is not production quality stuff yet. I don’t even know how well my phone is working now after I installed CM6, so I’m hesitating to even use the work “upgrade” and instead I just say “migrate”. Read the release notes in CyanogenMod’s forums carefully and use your discretion.

What I started out with:

1. A Nexus One phone.
2. A working stock rooted Froyo installation.
3. A bunch of user level applications, both from Market and self-installed APKs.
4. Donate version of Titanium Backup.
5. ClockWorkMod Recovery Image (but I’m pretty sure AmonRa would work just as well)
6. ADW Launcher installed from Market.
7. SMS Backup & Restore installed from Market.

My steps:

1. Downloaded the CM6 binary and Google Apps zip distro from the CyanogenMod release page.
2. Made use of the opportunity to remove some unused apps to reduce complexity and risk.
3. Moved all apps installed on SD card back to the phone. I just didn’t want to risk having problems recovering those applications after the migration. To do this, just go to Settings -> Applications -> Manage Applications -> On SD Card and go into each application listed there and move them back to the phone.
4. Went into ADWSettings and backup launcher configurations to SD card. After that, I uninstalled ADW Launcher. This is because CM6 comes with its own mix of ADW Launcher and I did not want Froyo’s automatic restoration of apps to clash with ADW Launcher.
5. Ran Titanium Backup and backed up all user apps and data.
6. Backed up all SMS using SMS Backup & Restore.
7. Selectively backed up certain system apps, namely “Android Keyboard” for me, for my custom dictionary. You really have to use your discretion here. You can try to backup all system apps, but I don’t know how well that’ll work.
8. Rebooted into ClockWorkMod Recovery Image.
9. Did a full nandroid backup.
10. Installed CM6 and Google Apps zip distro.
11. Did a full wipe.
12. Rebooted the phone.
13. Did Google account sign-in.
14. Waited for all apps that I previously downloaded from Market to be restored automatically. There will be a notification at the end of this process.
15. Fired up Titanium Backup and restored all user data (not app) for applications that are downloaded from Market.
16. Restored app and data for applications not downloaded from Market (self installed APKs).
17. Went to Settings -> ADWLauncher and restored ADWLauncher settings from SD card. This didn’t work for widgets; I had to re-add widgets after this but my app icons on the home screen and other settings were generally restored properly.
18. Restored all SMS using SMS Backup & Restore.

Done. As of right now, my Nexus One seems to be in working condition. Not sure what bugs will turn up but digging up bugs is the main purpose of this exercise, isn’t it?

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My perspective on using the Android isn’t really so much of a comparison, mainly because I’ve never actually owned an iPhone before. But I still like, even love, the HTC G1/Dream that I first bought and the Nexus One that replaced it.

When I first got my G1, I thought it was the ugliest, nay, fugliest phone ever. But I chose it still because, being my first touchscreen phone, I wanted a physical QWERTY keyboard to help me ease into the new environment. Back then, Android didn’t even have a soft keyboard yet (Android 1.0). I used it and was happy with it for a while. Didn’t like some quirks, such as the limitation on only one GMail account to sync with and the fact that I had to flip out the keyboard to do the simplest of typing tasks.

The Cupcake (Android 1.5) came out and I got my soft keyboard. I found myself enjoying the keyboard very much but didn’t like the fact that Cupcake made my G1 (with its severe hardware limitations) run as slow as molasses. After reading around, I realized that 3rd parties were actually taking the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) source code and releasing their own home-brewed rooted releases. So I selected the most popular 3rd party (CyanogenMod), read up on a couple of tutorials, rooted the phone and installed CyanogenMod. And then the world started opening up.

Immediately off the bat, I got tethering and A2DP, plus CyanogenMod’s speed screamed on my G1. And we got our Donut (Android 1.6) upgrade earlier than any one else waiting for official OTA updates too. When Google Navigation was introduced, it was locked to everyone but those using it in USA, but some cool dude by the name of Brut hacked it into supporting the rest of the world. That was really nice and enabled me to enjoy the full benefits of Android without having to be in the states. But at the back of my head, I was always thinking “this is nice, but I wouldn’t recommend it to my non-techie friends; I really wouldn’t want to end up being their tech support for this”.

However, at the same time, there is one thing that I would point out as an Android, even at this time: the fact that an Android phone is a complete peer to the PC and not a slave to it in any way. The iPhone is a peer in most aspects, but for major work such as upgrading of the OS, I believe you still need hook it up to a PC with iTunes installed. Unfortunately, this is a no-go for me as I’m a Linux user and iTunes is not available for that platform. With Android, I download the update (whether OTA if you’re not rooted or as a zip file if you are) and flash it with no necessity for it to be hooked up to a PC whatsoever. My experience with Apple devices is limited to the iPod that I bought for my girlfriend, and for every OS update thus far, I’ve had to hook it up to iTunes.

Then, the Eclair (Android 2.0 and 2.1) devices came out. By that time, I felt comfortable enough with the soft keyboard so I ordered the Nexus One instead of the Motorola Milestone (the GSM version of the Droid). And when I got my Nexus One, that’s when something “magical” (as Jobs likes to put it) happened. I merely switched off my G1, switched on the Nexus One, signed in to my Google account and:

1. My contacts were populated
2. My mails were populated
3. My calendar was populated
4. All the applications I was using on my G1 were installed automatically

It took all of 5 minutes for the migration from one Android phone to another. No need for any hooking up to a PC, backup software or anything! Really, I could do this all day long. No matter what phone you’re using, you have to admit that this is really one heckuva cool feature.

Now that leads to one double-edged sword of using any Android phone: you need to buy into Google’s vision of the cloud if you’re going to derive the best of the platform. This means that you need to have a Google account, use their mail services, their calendar for your organizational work etc etc. I have a friend who insisted that his smartphone must sync from his MS Outlook and not from any server-side service. He got a Milestone and to date, he’s still complaining that the included software to sync to Outlook isn’t working very well. I sympathize, but I don’t think he should have gotten an Android phone in the first place. The desktop sync software was probably developed by Motorola themselves and I can hardly expect the manufacturer of a phone with a shelf life of less than 2 years to do a good job of it compared to the core developer of the OS whose aim is to make the best OS it can in the long run.

But Google just isn’t interested in making the phone a slave to the desktop. In their vision, the desktop and your phone are peers, and both of them are slaves to the cloud. Google’s cloud, to be specific. Now, whether you buy into that vision or not is a personal decision. I made mine.

Now, back to the Nexus One. By this time, I had found a community of Android users in Kuala Lumpur. And get this, over half of them are not particularly tech-inclined. Most of them just like playing their games (there isn’t many of them, but the size is growing), switching home screen launcher apps to see which fits their usage profile better, using it to increase their productivity and getting around town with Navigation.

Personally, I’m constantly watching out for the day when Android becomes full-featured enough to satisfy my needs without having to root the device. As l33t as I feel by having a rooted phone, I’m very conscious of its downsides (would you pass your rooted Android phone to a toddler to play around with? I did, and I had to restore the bloody phone after he managed to wipe out half my system apps). Froyo (Android 2.2) made a couple of long strides towards this end. I love the inbuilt tethering, and as soon as they sort out the installation of applications on the SD card, we’re really almost there.

And more importantly, I can do all this and enjoy using my Android phone without having to put down any iPhone user. You can enjoy your phone, I’m definitely loving mine.

Oh, and do note that I’m ignoring all carrier-related factors in my evaluation. I don’t live in the states, and the fact that stateside users have to factor in carrier concerns when choosing a phone is just an indictment of how screwed up your telco industry is and that’s unrelated to the phone. Over here in Malaysia and Singapore (and probably many other countries as well), we choose our phones and network separately. Telco contracts in exchange for subsidies are available, but mostly optional. Life is just so much better for it.

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Glancing through my feeds, some comments seem to be centered around the theme “you’re just a web application peddler, what makes you think you can handle the complexity of maintaining a full-fledged OS?” (Sorry, I tried looking for references to where I read these comments but I can’t find ‘em right now).

Well, a husband and wife outfit can do it. Any other questions?

But still, the question of how would Google design its OS is a pretty interesting question. I kind of agree to this statement in their announcement:

However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era wheren there was no web.

Some may see it as a targeted broadside at Windows, but I see it more as a reflection of every single desktop system I’ve used thus far. Integration to the web from the desktop gets as far as a browser window running on your desktop and a few plasmoids/widgets/gadgets drawing on public APIs on social networking sites. At the end of the day, the mentality is still “I’m a standalone desktop, connected to the net”.

So here’s my interpretation and some pure conjecture about how Chrome OS would be designed, based on the clues they’ve left behind:

The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.

Nice to see that the kernel itself is still a sacred cow. Means that Google wants to remain abstracted from the hardware, for the most part. The new windowing system was a cause for concern for people seeking congruence with the status quo in Linux. Yes, if Google were to come up with it’s own “ChromeX”, it’d probably break compatibility with every single windowing toolkit in town.

It probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense; unless they really have no use for “windows” in its current state. Remember, Google is “just” a web application peddler. Practically every single one of their current application assets is a web application. So my guess here is that the new windowing system would be a drawing engine running on a bare metal kernel doing nothing but to render web pages as fast as any desktop system renders applications right now.

Think about it: your current desktop view as a web page? That’s already been done to death by now. Click on the shortcut to mail? A new <div> tag pops up with Gmail embedded within. The same happens for Facebook, Twitter and any other web-based app you care to remember. The thing to remember is, all these will happen beyond the confines of a browser window. The web app is your window to the world in Chrome OS.

Yeah, that’ll alienate all the traditional window-based GUI developers for sure. But think a while: is the population of web developers any smaller than that of desktop application developers? You’re swapping one developer community for another, and I can tell you a HTML “Hello World” app is a helluva lot easier than a QT one. Complex concepts such as IPC would no longer exist as we know it, replaced by a rather familiar (to a web developer) Javascript cross-domain eventing model.

And however screwed the web is right now in terms of web standards currently, is it any worse than what we have in the traditional desktop world? We’ve got Windows and Linux. And within Linux, we’ve got KDE, Gnome, XFCE ad infinitum. And none of them even look nice when you cross ‘em, if you can at all.

Some people accuse of Google of randomly throwing out toys everytime you get a haircut and not really having a strategy or focus on the bottom line besides AdSense. But if you care to look at Google’s activities recently, it does show a marked effort to push towards a common direction:

1. Google is making a huge push for the browser community to move towards HTML 5. To the extent where some are accusing them of manipulating the standards process to get what they want in. With HTML 5, multimedia capabilities would be built right into the browser engine, removing one huge blocker for having the browser as your desktop.

2. Total reliance on the Internet is all fun and games until that connection is lost. Then what?

   Says Mike Elgan. True. Then again, the last few times I was without internet access, I didn’t really see the point turning on the computer at all. In any case, Google has the beginnings of having that covered as well. Presenting Google Gears. Gears, in essence, is a caching application engine that allows you to run your apps offline (amongst other things). It even has its own embedded database.

3. Sounds like all these web applications are gonna take up a quite a bit of bandwidth. But Google is even tackling the social engineering bit now, actively encouraging web developers to make the web go faster. After all, it needs more web applications being able to run as fast as native desktop apps if it’s going to make this work.
4. Many were surprised when Google released Chrome the web browser. However, many of us quickly came to appreciate the minimalist UI, the raw speed of rendering and Javascript, and most of all the quiet elegance of it all. Even more surprises came when Google started actively pushing it to IE6 users, reminding them that they’re using an obsolete browser and they really should consider upgrading. Perhaps the powers-that-be in Google are growing impatient waiting for the old weezer to die a natural death, knowing that its continued preponderance would just delay the groundwork for it to roll out its pièce de résistance?

Now, it’s not that Google has gotten all the pieces of the puzzle in place yet, if they’re really trying for something as audacious as this. Apart from GMail and Maps, none of the other Google apps really cut it as a complete replacement for its desktop counterparts. And there’s a pretty significant percentage of the general populace who’d rather let their social security number get indexed on Bing than to allow Google to have access to all the data currently sitting on their desktops. Myself, I don’t think I’d use it either, I’m too much in love with my KDE setup right now. But it was just technically stimulating to try to visualize how the PhDs in Google would strategize something like this.

Oh. And what about games on Chrome OS? Hmmm. I don’t know, actually. Maybe Google’d just buy up Nintendo: “Here. Your Wii stick. Now go wank on it somewhere far away while we concentrate on our world domination.”

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Some of the comments surprise me, however. There seems to be this presumption that having something that’s OpenSource means you must “work with the community”. The GPL or any other OpenSource license defines the usage of the code. As long as you abide by the terms set in the licenses, you’re safe. Nowhere in the licenses do I see that you have to be part of a particular community to be OpenSource. The nature of OpenSource licenses are such that they encourage community-building (share and share alike) and a community is about the most efficient distribution model as well (especially with the lack of an official sales distribution channel). But it sure ain’t a prerequisite to join the club.

And there’s that word “community”. The word sounds warm and fuzzy, like everybody lives in a nudist colony and exchange kisses and hugs every time we meet. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s a brutal world out there. I’ve been tracking flame wars between KDE and Gnome since someone decided that GPL wasn’t a liberal enough license for them and started writing a new widget library (corrected by Rahul on this). RMS poking his nose the Linux mailing lists every once in a while correcting everyone on the actual name “GNU/Linux” was pretty nice flame fodder for a while, and then it got old. Recently, there’s this whole tempest about including Mono into Linux distros by default. Debate is good, and coming to blows after a pint too many build stronger bonds, but it sure doesn’t mean that one has to take part in it.

Google has plenty of money / resources and may think that it can go solo with this one. And they are free to do so if they wish. They will still need to release the source code when they release regardless. Fine, they may decide to create a permanent fork of certain components or even use their own versioning system, making it hard for the rest of the “community” to take advantage of improvements. That goes both ways; it’ll be difficult for them to gain improvements from the other contributors as well. Apple did that with their WebKit fork of KHTML, where they did a periodic code dump into the original KDE source tree making it difficult for anybody to comprehend what enhancements were made. Yeah, it was grating on the rest of the KDE developers, but completely legal. But let’s take a step back now. Has Google been pulling a lot of this shit often? I really don’t think so. They maintain Google Code, which is being used for exactly what the “community” wants: community-based development. They announced Google Wave, and the next thing you know the Wave Protocol site is up for all to see. As far as being part of the community for development purposes is concerned, I think they’ve been doing that all this while and doing it better than most large companies.

So, what else do these communities want from Google?

It’s disappointing that they’ve chosen to go it alone this far rather than working with the existing communities – Joe Brockmeier

I think Intel made the right call with Moblin to put the effort in the hands of the Linux Foundation and try to work with the larger community – Joe BrockMeier

So, they want Google to work with “existing communities”. Well, it’s an OS they’re working on, and unless they start a complete new branch of the Linux kernel, I’m pretty sure they’d be working with the kernel team and submitting patches and all that. What other “existing communities” does Joe want them to work with? Ubuntu? His own Novell / OpenSuSE? As in, ride on your own product and endorse your product as “the preferred distro for Google’s OS”?

So let me get this straight: It’s not enough that you get the direct results of Google’s development effort, you want them to park themselves behind you and help you market your product as well?

Wake up, guys, this is competition. The distro stakeholders might be all pally when it comes to talking down the competition (Microsoft, in this case) and sharing code, but apart from that, it’s a dog-eat-dog world. Chrome OS, as another Linux distro, would be operating at the same level with Red Hat/Ubuntu/Debian/Slackware/ad infinitum. And apart from the common code that they share with each other, the only other thing that they should share is the common desire to rip each other to pieces.

Now that’s capitalism.

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1. :$ - Move to the last line (why this instead of shift-G? read below)
2. :10 - Move to line no 10, just substitute with any other number. So, just remember “$” means “last line” and you will find it more intuitive.
3. :0,$ s/replace this/with this/g - Literally, it means “from lines 0 to last line ($), search for “replace this” and replace with “with this”. If you want you can just change the range, for e.g. “2,10″ to mean lines 2 to 10. If you omit the “g” at the end of the command, it means only replace the first instance that vim encounters on a particular line. With “g”, it will replace all instances. Try “:0,$ s/hello/goodbye/g” and “:0,$ s/hello/goodbye/” on a file that has “hello Sam hello Delilah” to see how this works.
4. v - Type the character “v” and start moving your cursor around. You’ll see that it highlights an entire block, readying a selection for you to do cut n paste (see below for cut n paste)
5. shift-v - Does the same as “v” but for whole lines
6. ctrl-v - Does the same as “v” but in arbitrary block mode (hard to explain, try and you’ll know)
7. To copy, first highlight a selection of text using any instruction from 4-6. Then press “ay (with the double quote). The selection will disappear. Move your cursor some where else. Then press “ap .
8. To cut, do the same as “7″ but substitute “ay with “ax .
9. All the copy n paste shit above is nice, but has been rendered obsolete by modern terminal emulators that allow you to use a mouse to highlight and copy/paste. But this is why I still use this trick. After you have done either 7 or 8, do NOT quit the editor, but highlight another block of text using any instruction from 4-6. Now type “by . Now move your cursor somewhere else and type “bp . Now type “ap again. You will see that the text that you copied using “ay and “byhave actually been stored into different buffers (or “registers” in VIM convention). You can declare many more registers just by swapping “a” and “b” with “c” or “d” or… you get the idea.
10. And finally, remember that you can tell vim to perform a command X times very easily. For e.g., highlight a line and type “ay to copy into register “a”. Then type 10″ap. You will see that it has pasted register “a” 10 times. Cool, huh? Just prepend your command with a number to tell vim to run it that number of times.

Note that these tricks work mostly with VIM (VI Improved), not plain vi.

In (K)Ubuntu, only a minimal build of vim is installed by default. To upgrade it, just type “sudo aptitude install vim”. You should know which version you’re using pretty easily. Just edit a shell script, if there’s no syntax highlighting, it means you don’t have the full VIM installed. Otherwise, things are cool.

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Of the formative figures in open source, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Eric Raymond loom large. Arguably, however, few have had as much of a disruptive force as Tim O’Reilly, who has helped to create the open-source market and has spent the last six years reshaping it with his seminal “Open Source Paradigm Shift” and other articles.

Now, I know Tim O’Reilly has some pretty strong contributions to OpenSource. And I also know that RMS isn’t exactly the most popular kid on the block in terms of commercial OpenSource. But to say Tim O’Reilly’s contributions are more disruptive than Stallman’s? Torvalds? Seriously, in what context?

After thinking a while, I spotted a pattern in Asay’s claim with others made in the past. Gottlieb Daimler was the dude who invented the automobile. Yet, Henry Ford is far more well-known than Daimler for bringing cars to the masses via the production assembly line. Electricity, while never being “invented”, was studied since the 17th century, yet Edison gets most of the glory for his efforts harnessing the electricity for the masses.

Not to take away anything from O’Reilly, Edison and Ford, but this really stinks of the “what have you done for me lately?” syndrome. Cars are still being used now, so yeah, we appreciate Mr Ford for all he’s done for us. But come 2 decades later and we’re all zipping around on Segways sans wheels, would we still remember him?

Back to OpenSource: O’Reilly cannot be compared to RMS. Or Torvalds. Fine, he’s about on par with ESR in my book. What O’Reilly wrote about reflected what was happening in the real world and where it was headed to. He did not write a roadmap for the evolution of OpenSource in general. To attribute the progress of OpenSource in general to the written journals of an observer like he was the Oracle is simply belittling the entire process. It’s like (dare I say it?) some religious nut claiming that the world and its magical complexity came about just from the “design” of an individual deity.

We all ride on the shoulders of others. Even RMS, Torvalds and other OpenSource luminaries. Before drafting the GPL, RMS was already happily coding the same way he always liked in the academic software community, until the hardware vendors decided that software was more valuable than the pieces of plastic and lead it was driving. I hesitate to compare the contributions of RMS and his predecessors as one could not have happened without the other. The same applies to O’Reilly.

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