The, Wow So Small OS!

I thought and found Linux distros to be lightweight and so worth of their sizes in MB, until I came across this tiny little bit of operating system. "KolibriOS". So small that it is capable of even booting off a floppy disc and exactly 2.98MB ISO CD image while I write this.
The most amazing fact about the OS being that it is neither based on Linux nor on Windows, it is written in machine code. This tiny little bit of data shows us how bloated Windows and Linux are by packing so many soft-wares within these 3K bytes, check it out on your own.

OpenSource Income

I love open source, and there are so many of them the open source an freeware supporters and promoters! But the problem is when a man or exactly a programmer really gets open source he has got problems surviving the tough market, he has to do what other paid companies do, without even the financial part of the support. And surviving oneself is another thing. And we people who don't even mind using pirated material, when did we get so sensible so as to support those open source developers.
So in these tough conditions one has to decide, having two ways to handle it either take the open source project lightly and make it a side work doing it in your spare time, but this way the product life-cycle takes a back seat hampering the product, after all coding is no fun stuff, it expects dedication; or the other way to manage is leave your work, and make the open source project as your work, expecting your users to provide you with enough to survive! Similar is the condition with Michael Gundlach! I suggest we should never ever let them starve.
If by any chance you have used the AdBlock Extension for Google Chrome(it has a very strong user base of 1,000,000 users and has got 4.5 stars out of 5) , did you ever chanced to click on the link "Did You Know This Is My Full Time Job?"(See Pic Below), i tried finding the link but cant find it any more than just at one place at the options page of AdBlock. I know, AdBlock may be stealing my or any other blogger's revenue generating users by not letting them view ads, still I love to see open source/freeware success stories. Why should blogger's block AdBlock?

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The Open Source Café

This is an unedited version of my talk to one of my friend:
" .......as a foot note let me tell you a kind of case study of reception of Linux in India ( if you don't get bored ). I was quite frequent one of th nearby cyber cafe, which made me quiet free to talk to the cyber cafe man! I one day asked him: why you use XP, whilst you have pretty good configs! (i was actually asking for the 7 thing) so we had a chat like what are the problems, virus and all. And that conversation lead me to many probable answers for "why not Linux"!<i mean cons with common man>. So in the end of it i figured it out that in the cybercafe at-least one or more person will be using internet, apart from the gaming thing in the cafe, as commonly one who came for gaming didn't surf and vice-versa, as this will also ease him on some computers' configurations. And i even proposed him to handle one computer's problems to me. Which meant any customer facing any problems on that computer will be my responsibility. So here began my research and experimenting time. I first of all listed out the problems of a lay user surfing internet which he will face on Linux, and found out that for and average customer there were no problems he can have. So here was a good news. First of all i installed Ubuntu and then worked out for the internet connection and codec thing with the help of a friend. And rest of it was done as i installed some basic software one needs. Rest was taken case by Ubuntu itself. Firefox was there, PDF reader, gimp, vlc, 7zip all went to desktop and what else was needed. (actually if i had worked out with mint it would have been a bit easier for the codec thing, or even Kubuntu). That was it and the special thing was that the over all user experience feedback was very good as most of the people were not even bothered, they didn't had any problems, they worked as usual, as almost all the soft-wares were already familiar specially the Firefox. Some users who wanted to work on their own soft-wares were shifted to the windows system. I even gave him a CD with boot'able "Geexbox" for users who came just for watching movies(why bother them, what else can be better than a 8 MiB full featured easy to use media player distro) Today even most of the daily life apps have gone online soo...
I told him that you can dual boot but that'll be cumbersome. And that was it. After some weeks of surveillance i left him(cyber cafe man) with his own armour and the bad thing he again swiched to Windblows, saying it was an over all mess for him, if someone asked him for help. Whatever this experience was great and rewarding. I learnt a lot from it. Thats it...."

vujà Dé vs Piracy

Piracy Concerns

 For decades altogether there has been a trade off between the so much familiar Windows and the uh! so Geeky Linux. I don't take sides or justify either of them, but the concern is that at most of the instants and over and over again we've chosen the cheaper, easily accessible and the unofficial over the ethical, proper and most importantly the Costlier. And I was amazed to find that in India people don't even know what they are doing, And yours sincerely doesn't even remember how many Ubuntu iso's he has burned and distributed thinking this may help, but the only product is: Why bother?, Whats the difference between that so tough to learn copy of yours and this one you I have! .Its not that this kind of piracy is just limited to India or it is due to poverty or any such thing this blog shows a live example where Bill Gates himself agreed of watching pirated movies on You-tube himself, amazing isn't it!! Interesting part of the Microsoft story: I saw shops hanging cardboard signs written on them "Windows 7 available", I checked my wrist watch and it said 20 OCT 2009, two days before the Windows official release date, I was like :-O.... Microsoft even said "we love Microsoft piracy on China" , because in exact words of one of my friend, software piracy helps windows:

Do you know why Wind-blows still survives and Linux is not considered (for many)... That's because piracy exists... If there will be a full on no piracy law... Win-blows' days will be over... And then Linux will be considered among the mainstream OSes.

Even big companies as Microsoft get laid before such large scale piracy problems, Microsoft has been seen providing free software to counteract piracy. Every one is affected with this kind of piracy, authors of books, soft-wares, photographs, its not limited, things are worse with intellectual property data theft.
There has been different approaches to stop piracy, keys, online activation, DRM, anything, everything, has been done, but as they say, "build a more idiot-proof system, and bigger better idiots will appear!"
I've seen many of my friends get frustrated of intellectual property theft. The most interesting part is that people are devising social methods to counteract these problems and amazingly they help! Some even made themselves believe that their e-books being pirated doesn't necessarily means they are losing money,it may even mean that they are getting more money out of their product. One of the authors even complained that some people asked him to mail them the PDF copy of his book and as he mailed them the other day his books were distributed all over the net! The situation is that Cory Doctrow and Roy Osherove provide the links to download their own books on the net for free!! There's also a software, which reminds us to be on the right side, every-time someone tries to pirate it.

Piracy Initiative. Courtesy:labnol.org

I've seen, almost all of the time there's one, at least one open source or freeware alternative (like LiVES, Avidemux, Virtualdub, GIMP and many more), and for all fields and most of the times open-source's have satisfied me more than enough (Stellarium, Celestia etc). But for most people, how does that make any differences. One comment from a friend about the concern:

Indian world is just hanging on this piracy thread, I mean the cyber-cafe's and all... No international music (most of them)... No unreleased movies and many things like exposure to Windows, Photoshop and many other soft-wares can be imagined without piracy.

Due to their deep concern Indian Govt. has started implementing the open-source (Linux) initiative, this brings hope to lives of people, this makes those thousands of coders work just for nothing, just for the sake of making this world a better open-source or at-least non-pirated place to live!
I wonder, do those coders out there sitting in the Microsoft and such other labs intentionally leave Loopholes!?, so that this continues. Is it a marketing strategy to let their soft-wares get publicized, I've never seen a Hackintos, at least not yet!
So we should be aware of this piracy and the privacy(at least read once, what you accept!!) thing and make people aware of its consequences and try to avoid the Piracy. Be aware, Use Genuine, at least think of it we have got ample options!!
 
Thank you, subham. Photograph courtesy: pirate bay, labnol.