I’m a big fan of open source. With Vista’s launch loom­ing in 2007 I expect either a large mon­e­tary wind­fall for MS or a large exo­dus of its cus­tomers. Vista is stack­ing up to be the next ME. Those in the know have already heard of the Microsoft-Novell patent deal (or non-aggression pact as I’d like to look at it); per­haps it’s an attempt to help stave off the exo­dus. In any case, Linux et al. have cer­tainly gen­er­ated enough mind space that they’re a viable threat (though I expect Apple to steal more mar­ket share unless Linux gets its act together). Per­son­ally, I’m not look­ing to spend more money on an OS that is priced more than the hard­ware it runs on. And I’m always press­ing my bosses to move away from closed-source soft­ware where it makes sense. I’m not against closed source soft­ware because I don’t mind pay­ing for prod­ucts. How­ever, when open source soft­ware meets or exceeds the capa­bil­i­ties of it’s closed source coun­ter­part, it doesn’t make eco­nomic sense to con­tinue pay­ing for the closed source ver­sion. You’re bet­ter off donat­ing a por­tion of what you would have paid to the open source devel­op­ers. (What I am against are pro­pri­etary stan­dards and soft­ware patents, but that’s a whole other topic.)

The crux of the issue comes down to control—control of your infor­ma­tion and ulti­mately your dol­lar. Open source puts the con­trol back into your hands. My first encounter with this is the fact that my Com­paq Pre­sario has a black­listed DSDT which pre­vents ACPI from load­ing. Xubuntu being an open source Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion gives me the capa­bil­ity to fix the prob­lem. (Whether I suc­ceed or not, we’ll see.) Granted ACPI “worked” under Win­dows, but I’ve come to find out that Win­dows sim­ply ignored any prob­lems with DSDTs. (Kinda reminds me of IE quirks mode.) Then there’s the fact that a small nation could not con­vince MS to pro­duce a local­ized ver­sion of Win­dows because it would not have been prof­itable. So the nation decided to cre­ate it’s own local­ized Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion. Con­trol of infor­ma­tion isn’t lim­ited to just soft­ware either. I mean it’s only just recently peo­ple were able to keep their cell phone num­bers when trans­fer­ring ser­vices. Yet, even now, mobile ser­vice providers lock your phones to their net­works and have cus­tom firmware installed on phones to remove/limit fea­tures to the point you have to go through them to get any data onto the phone. As much as I covet the price-performance of Sony prod­ucts, I do not admire them for con­tin­u­ing to try to force pro­pri­etary stan­dards on their con­sumers. Which brings me to the coolest thing about the open source movement—open source hardware.

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The cost of the Iraq War and Recon­struc­tion to the US is going to sur­pass $350,000,000,000. That’s $350 bil­lion dol­lars. A far cry from the orig­i­nal esti­mate of $50 bil­lion. This same admin­is­tra­tion in 2000 decided not to sign the Kyoto Pro­to­col cit­ing that its flawed (which I agree—the biggest flaw being the exemp­tion of both China and India) and that it’s too expen­sive. Expen­sive because the admin­is­tra­tion esti­mated the total cost would have been $325 bil­lion over decades and would’ve hurt the US econ­omy. This admin­is­tra­tion, by start­ing a war and try­ing to clean up after itself, has spent well in excess of that in just 3 years! I doubt any num­bers from Bush’s admin­is­tra­tion can really be trusted. (Remem­ber this is the most secre­tive admin­is­tra­tion in US his­tory.) So I’m sure the orig­i­nal cost esti­mate of becom­ing a more envi­ron­men­tally friendly coun­try is grossly over-estimated. Besides, never doubt the capa­bil­ity of com­pa­nies to inno­vate, reduce costs, and find loop­holes, even when faced with new reg­u­la­tions. The Kyoto Pro­to­col will detri­men­tally affect the US econ­omy? I doubt that. Not as dras­ti­cally as this par­tic­u­lar war has by divert­ing money bet­ter spent elsewhere.

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High-performance elec­tric vehi­cle. Sounds like an oxy­moron given what per­for­mance peo­ple are used to see­ing out of today’s hybrids. Yet, back in the hey­day of the dot­com boom, there was a lit­tle known com­pany called AC Propul­sion whose video of their tZero con­cept car just made my jaw drop.

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