Santa Cruz, CA
For the last decade Karsten has been teaching and living the open source way. As a member of Red Hat's premier community leadership team, he helps with various community activities in the Fedora Project and other projects Red Hat is involved in. As a 15 year IT industry veteran, Karsten has worked most sides of common business equations as an IS manager, professional services consultant, technical writer, and developer advocate.
Karsten lives in his hometown of Santa Cruz, CA with his wife and two daughters on their small urban farm, Fairy-Tale Farm, where they focus on growing their own food and nurturing sustainable community living.
Authored Comments
Yes, thanks for the question.
There is a <a href="http://www.theopensourceway.org/book/The_Open_Source_Way.pdf">PDF version</a>, and two HTML versions - a <a href="http://www.theopensourceway.org/book/">multi-page</a> and an <a href="http://www.theopensourceway.org/book/single-page/">all-in-one-page</a>.
You can find this in a neat list on the front page of the wiki:
<a href="http://www.theopensourceway.org/wiki/Main_Page#Pretty_and_handy_book_format">http://www.theopensourceway.org/wiki/Main_Page#Pretty_and_handy_book_format</a>
The content in the wiki is often more current than the PDF and HTML format. We do the content development in the wiki, then do regular version updates of the book.
There is another angle, which is that the desire to tinker has a bell curve to it. Early adopters may tinker more, then the middle folks don't care as much, but at a time in the future, when what was special is now commonplace, the need to tinker comes back stronger.
From what I know and <a href="http://buruonbrails.blogspot.com/2009/09/android-vs-maemo.html">have read about iPhone and Android application development</a>, I think they have both painted themselves in to a corner. Android's corner is bigger and will take longer to hit, but it will come.
So, we're aware that iPhone enables developers to reach consumers with smaller scale, smaller priced applications. When you take 100 people, 80 of them are going to only want something that works, and that is Apple's market. The sustainability problem is, the remaining 20 people are going to include the innovators that will one day replace Apple. They are either the actual inventors or the people who adopt the new invention first, bringing the rest of the 80 along That is a problem that happens along side the problem of Apple being unable to support a continuously growing developer community with extremely closed tools and storefront processes.
Similarly, Android is going to see a big uptake because they come close to gaining from the free/open source software model. However, there are two things going against them. Currently, they appear to have a different fork for each vendor with an Android-based phone. Those hardware vendors are still putting their energy in differentiating their Android on their phone. We don't know (yet) how far off from the mainline those various Andoid forklets are, but that will come back to bite everyone.
The other issue is the development environment. Android is a Linux kernel plus a virtual machine, with apps running in the VM. Everything that already exists in FOSS needs to be ported to run on Android, with varying degrees of hassle. Add that to the customization layers the hardware vendors put on it, and you have a single market already fragmented beneath the surface, with a higher barrier for developers.
By comparison, Maemo is written on a Debian base as a relatively thin telephony/work environment. When I want to get my favorite GNOME or KDE application running on my phone, I'll be far, far closer to running it under Maemo than I would be getting it to run in Android.
My prediction is, over the not-very-long-horizon the mobile OS will be a commodity, and the one that is built best to follow the open source way is the one that we'll use on more of our phones.