At the end of each week I round up what I have been reading online. If you discover an interesting link that you think should be covered then please drop me an email using warrior at commandline dot org dot uk.

Automatic Custom Linux Isos

Ravi at All about Linux has discovered a great link, instalinux.com

This web page allows you to create your own custom image of a GNU/Linux distro, which you then can download and install. The process is simple, a form based wizard where you choose what you want and click next. This webpage will cook you an iso of Debian, Fedora, SuSE, Ubuntu or Kubuntu.

This idea has a great potential. A lot of the binary distros require you to download up to half a dozen disks of stuff that you may need but probably won't. This website allows you to install only what you want.

Commanding your web server

Joel Padot talks about the dilemma of what to do when you need more control than shared web hosting can provide. This is a similar predicament that I have been facing. Joel found that a virtual private server (VPS) hosting setup was a suitable compromise that would take him forward.

Barriers of entry for developers on various platforms

Tom Cruise in the film Jerry McGuire was encouraged to shout "Show me the money!". Call me cynical, blame my economics degree, but I often start by following the money, you can often then get an idea of what is likely to happen, or at least conceivable.

Commander Clueless, in Why I Don't Code on the Windows Platform, makes a very interesting point. Traditionally operating system vendors such as Microsoft or Apple Mac have seen third-party developers as a revenue stream. Charge a large whack for the development tools because the developer's company has no choice but to pick up the tab.

Contrast this with the free/open-source community. The first things Richard Stallman and his GNU project released in the early eighties was a free compiler (GCC) and free programmers' text editor (Emacs). There is no such thing as external vs internal developers, everyone is as in (or out) as everyone else. With GNU/Linux, you do not need anything to develop with, it is all bundled in at the minimum price of free. Many developers, especially young independent ones, do not have money to buy hugely expensive proprietary licences.

The huge difference in the barriers of entry, both financial and institutional, will have corresponding effects on the size of the developer ecosystem around the operating systems in the years to come.

Say you have a great idea and some great code that will innovate or revolutionise some specific application or function. In the Windows world you can email it to Microsoft and receive a bounceback message and hope that someone at the helpdesk reads it and realises the importance and hands it on to the developers, you would not expect Bill Gates to ever hear of you.

With say, the Linux kernel, if you mail the mailing list then Linus Torvolds will read your email himself; if you submit a patch to Emacs, it is quite likely that Richard Stallman will be the first person to look at it.

Considering the current spread of western views of copyright (i.e the ideas developed by the medieval European elite) that are being imposed on the rest of the world, it is increasingly common to find that universities, government organisations and companies in the two-thirds world, have replaced illegal (according to the west) copies of Windows with a legit copies of GNU/Linux, often in variants compiled locally.

Now these tens of thousands of emerging young developers in the two-thirds world may well be the future of information technology, these emerging programmers and other IT professionals are being brought up on GNU/Linux. For them there is no bloated inertia against using whatever is different.

Commercialisation of GNU/Linux

The ecosystem of free/open source software is big. While most people active in the community are volunteers, whether that be hacking code, writing documentation, providing online spport or spreading the good news; some of the projects at the core of it all are increasingly commercial.

A interview published the other day with Alan Cox at zdnet, talked about the case of the Linux kernel:

> Ingrid Marson: Many kernel developers work for companies nowadays. For example, lead kernel maintainers > > Linus Torvalds and Andrew Morton work for OSDL, while you work for Red Hat. How many independent kernel developers are there nowadays? > > Alan Cox: Probably not that many. There are some students who do work on the kernel. One thing that drives students to work on the kernel is that it offers good job prospects. If you're a good kernel developer, you'll soon get e-mails from large companies offering you a job.

Although those working on the kernel are increasingly likely to be paid for their efforts, it is still a free and open system, anyone can come along and get involved.