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IDC sells reports with comments like the following for thousands of dollars:

"Despite the dominance of the Windows platform, Linux adoption continues to grow in the region in both the COE and server operating environment (SOE) spaces," says Antony Lee, market analyst, Software Research, IDC Asia/Pacific.

...

"On the desktop side, IDC sees Linux share more than doubling, from 3% today to 6% in 2007, while Windows loses a bit of ground."

So, people who scientifically design and implement surveys reported that GNU/Linux was the size of Mac on the desktop a few years ago and it is still growing rapidly.

see this excerpt. That was from 2005. If the share was 3% then and growing rapidly, how can the NetApps share of less than 1% possibly be true unless NetApps' universe is unrepresentative? That was before Dell and ASUS jumped in.

So. There are no signs of GNU/Linux on the desktop slowing down any time soon and Chinese Linux Market

We know there are millions of GNU/Linux desktops there, because Sun made a deal to supply millions of them. see Sun story (2003)

Turbolinux is also in China in a big way. "According to the International Data Corp. (IDC), Turbolinux's market share in servers in China was 62 percent in 2004. On the desktop, it holds a 25 percent share. "

see http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=170700943 (2005)

GNU/Linux is huge in China, a country several times the population of the USA with a huge growth in GDP. Hundreds of millions there will be first time computer buyers within a few years and they are not locked-in to M$

Numbers are not too much different in the BRIC (Brazil Russia India and China). There, governments are activly promoting GNU/Linux by using it themselves, putting it into schools or insisting on open file formats.

"Sun executives were meeting with Brazilian government executives and were told in no uncertain terms that the government would not consider any technology that wasn't open source. " see www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3697166

So Brazil was the straw that broke the camel's back and caused Sun to open Java.

BRIC is 2.65 thousand million people. see http://www.xminc.com/mt/archives/000177.html Many are poor but rapidly industrializing and hungry for IT. Are they going to want a bloated OS or a lean, mean, computing machine? Do not be misled by NetApps. Unless their clients are audited and deemed to be representative of the world somehow, they must be considered way off base.

China is huge. If you look at http://google.com/trends and enter linux,windows you will see that other OS has a steady lead over time with Google. Now, zero in on China. Interesting, eh? Now, zero in on Beijing. Whoops! Where did the lead go? Beijing is a huge city and the seat of government. Stories about that other OS taking over there are overstated, even at $3 a licence.

OO2beta has been excellent for me, with exception of table pasting suckage and crash issues which I have experienced. If they've fixed these as well, well that's just wonderful. I use the Windows version.

from the previous week http://www.xminc.com/mt/archives/000275.html.

gewg_

From my weblog

Oracle's current work on Mozilla Lightning (Thunderbird Mail + Sunbird Calendar ++) should be interesting. Thunderbird is already a fairly decent mail client. Its main flaws from a large company perspective are its lack of calendaring and administration tools (pushing updates, profiles etc). If Oracle can fix these flaws and tie it to the Oracle database backend they should have a product they can sell.

What Oracle will need to do:

1) Fix the flaws and make it "good enough" for most business use
2) Create a connector to the Oracle database backend (something more efficient then IMAP)
3) Promote it in places where exchange is seen as a headache to be avoided: Universities, Small Businesses, Charities, Developing countries.. etc
4) Slowly move up the food chain until it is usable by Oracle's bread and butter clients - Financial institutions and large companies, & governments.
5) Tie the pricing to the customer's current licensing agreement - for example, Customers could get a reduced per CPU Oracle licensing charge if they use Lightning with the Oracle backend.

The trick will be to ensure that Mozilla Lightning supports POP3, IMAP, and Oracle DB Backend seamlessly so that the customer could slowly move up the food chain. Also important will be tools to do the Exchange to Thunderbird/Lightning migration in a background script, RIM(PDA) integration, and Exchange coexistence tools.

Opportunities

Security
One of the perceived weaknesses of Exchange is security. An opportunity will be to create a simple way to manage S/Mime or PGP certificates centrally. Copying and improving a system similar to the one that Lotus Notes uses might be a first step.

Automated Archiving
Financial institutions spend large amounts of money in software to manage archives to meet Sarbanes Oxley and FED regulations. If Oracle were to integrate tools for this then they might have a slight advantage over MS Exchange.

Another review:

It hasn't quite caught up with MS Office 2003 in terms of functionality - but who cares? OpenOffice 2.0 is more that good enough for your average office worker. The suite is comparible to older versions of MS Office, which are functioning fine on millions of desktops around the world. The only things that I really disliked was the increased reliance on proprietary software (Java JRE) and the interoperability issues I experienced cutting and pasting tables between calc, write and impress. The Beta is currently a bit slow - however that should improve once it is released and any debugging code is removed. The user interface feels significantly nicer than the previous version; however, the dialog boxes are still not perfect. The suite uses Oasis file format - which may become the holy grail of document formats. HTML editing in write is far superior to MS Word and I recommend OpenOffice as a filter for word documents that require conversion to HTML or Oasis. Write includes a long awaited WordPerfect import filter. Overall I was extremely impressed with the new MS Office interoperability and the application's overall functionality.

* Very good new functionality
* Oasis file format - may be the new killer feature
* Meets the needs of your average text oriented office worker
* Excellent MS Office Integration
* Annoying Java JRE reliance. Either open source java or remove the dependancy.
* Dialog boxes occasionally still feel clunky
* Crashes and table copy and paste issues need to be cleaned up before gold release
* Free and open source

7.7 out of 10

Actually I forecasted this on my weblog last week.

Here is why: Oracle is now officially pushing linux on its customer base (they are slowing moving Oracle Hosting Services (OHS) over to a Linux based service. IBM is removing support for Solaris (Domino, Websphere, DB2). And Checkpoint is pushing Linux appliance servers. And so Sun is seeing an assult from all quarters.

In fact most people buy Oracle per CPU (typically $50K per CPU). Those running a machine with AMD Opterons running 64 bit Suse Linux and Oracle can expect to see a 4x improvement in performance per dollar of Oracle licensing fees. PowerPC also outperform Sun machines - and so many Banks are switching to AIX to reduce Oracle licensing fees.

What does that leave for Sun? To move up the value chain and start selling a system with a database integrated right into the OS. Sun will want a database that they can control though - so I bet the relationship with CA Ingris will sour (joint ventures almost never work) and they will switch to supporting Postgresql or another database they can dominate and buy up most of the developers.

Librie EBR-1000EP made by Sony in Japan, using an E Ink display, is an e-book reader. No one has yet hacked into it. Although one user has opened the case and is trying to connect to the internal serial port. He can't figure out the pin mappings as of yet.

Due to some XML hacks you can now read any text on the device, such as project gutenburg books.

more info, the yahoo group and my weblog entry on this.

From my weblog:
http://www.xminc.com/mt/archives/000085.html

Indias IITs overrated

When people talk about India as a place to invest they invariably mention the IITs; Indian Institutes of Technology. I visted a few of them in 1997 - and the students they graduate are the elite of India. A very bright bunch. No one seems to mention that only 4,000 of them graduate every year. Of that 1,900 are graduate degree holders.

That total is smaller than than one major university in the US such as Cornell despite the fact that there are six of them, for a country of almost 1 Billion. The majority of IIT graduates flee India for the US, Canada, UK and Austrailia. Few return.

Greater China meanwhile is the largest source of US foreign students. China has more that 60,000 graduates from US schools (4000 from top universities - Ivy League etc) per year. In the 1990s more that 40% of US Electrical Engineering Phds went to Taiwan Nationals (a country of only 22 Million). Most return to China or Taiwan.

According to UNESCO only 27 percent of children in India were enrolled in grade one. A lot of work needs to be done for general education. If too many foreign companies start business process outsourcing to India the market for knowledge workers will quickly become bleak.

China and Taiwan have school attendance rates comparable or superior to the US.

Indians have a tendancy migrating to Canada, UK, US or Australia. I think because they feel more at home with the language.

(ps my first post contained a typo WWI -> WWII)

The post WWII US dominance was due to military funding of the cold war and the so called "spunik generation". Americans who went into science because of Russia launching the first rockets.

US mainland received no substantial attacks during WWI - so the economy dominated the world. More money was left for corporate R&D.

Asia - in particlar China + Taiwan will dominate the end of the century scientifically if degrees are any indicator. 1 in 6 Chinese degrees go to Engineering or Science. Most US Phds in sciences go to Asians (Primarily Chinese). They are increasingly heading home after finishing their Phds.

The only question is that historically Chinese have not focused on basic research - prefering practical applications of technology such as the steelyard, abacus, ceramics, papermaking, printing, the compas, oil rigs, etc

Check out a quick faq I wrote http://www.xminc.com/linux/wxpython.html. I would check out kylix from borland or wxWindows.

Moving from windows to linux development you are confronted with a myriad of options. QT vs GTK+? Which language should I use: c/c++/java/perl/tcl/python/ruby or javascript? Should I use a commercial/proprietary layout/rad tool (QT or Kylix) or an open source one? What about Mozilla? My background was primarily in programming Visual Basic and Lotus Notes(Basic, Java, c/c++ api). Where should I start?

Bill Gates loves to talk about the economic transformation that is happening in China. - "China is just in a league of its own and it's like no one else is paying attention" . I wonder does it bug him that the transformation is happening mostly on pirated software?

As it is happening 92% with pirated software - what does that say about software's role in economic development? Go out and pirate - 75-cent copies of XP and Office for everyone! Perhaps developing countries should mandate piracy?

Bill Gates and Steve Balmer are smart men. Why aren't they and Microsoft forcing the software piracy issue like they have done in Taiwan? Presumably they are not doing it out of goodwill. If they did we would see large write-offs on the donations in the MS Annual Report.

The real driver is that Microsoft wants to get market share to lock-in the market. In ten years time when China is far wealthier their lawyers will come calling - much like they have done in Taiwan. Despite China's "one china" policy - Microsoft obviously has a three-china intellectual property protection policy (HK, Taiwan, & Mainland).

This smacks of illegal dumping. Dump your product on the country to effectively eliminate the chance of any local competition appearing and shut out your competitors. Once the country can afford to pay the $1000 a user MS Office + MS CAL + MS XP fees send in the lawyers. The switching costs at that point will be too high and they will be forced to pay. This is exactly what Microsoft did in Taiwan - supposedly a part of China.

What should developing countries do? Sue Microsoft for dumping. How can the company be held accountable for the actions of other people selling pirated products? In Canada recently, Tobacco Companies were held accountable for allowing smuggled tobacco to be illegally dumped from the US. Microsoft is playing an equally sinister game. It is obvious that Microsoft will in the long gain from piracy in China, much like a company illegally dumping products below cost can profit in the long term.

Software piracy is the number one problem for Linux and Open Source software in developing countries and something must be done about it.

I have been looking at systems to manage workflow for a customer. Proprietary solutions we've looked at include Lotus Domino(on Linux)/ Exchange 200x / and Lotus Workflow (runs on Linux).

The advantage of Lotus Workflow is it very high level and thus allows you to concentrate on improving the business processes. Unfortunately it is very expensive (10K server and $60 per client)

How does Zope compare? (I love python).

Anthony
http://xminc.com/anthony