A weekend getaway can do wonders for you.

After working on the porting project to make Flex Builder run on Linux, I am starting to see why closed source software on Linux is hard.

There are just a handful of closed source products on Linux (counting only the famous ones) - Opera, Skype, Nero, Acrobat Reader, and Flash Player. Hmmm, I can think of just 5.

Why is that important at all? Because software developers who are not initiated to the FOSS philosophy will be scared off the platform because of its inherent complexities. For example, in this project, getting the software to run on the various Linux distros was, to put it lightly, troublesome.

There are a number of issues that we faced, which I’m certain is the reason others don’t want to get into this as well.

Let’s start with Eclipse. Eclipse runs fairly well on different platforms (let’s ignore the memory-hogging issue here), but on Linux, it’s a different ballgame. Somehow, the polishing of the UI is markedly lacking. Yes, we’ve filed bugs, but turns out it’s not really Eclipse’s fault, it’s simply because different window managers work differently on Linux, and handling all of this is a nightmare.

Oh, and this gets better when it comes to distros. For example, the latest released Eclipse 3.3 won’t run on the latest released Fedora version. You have to wait till Fedora 8! Because of this, we had to drop support for Fedora, and instead concentrated on other distros such as Suse, Red Hat and Ubuntu.

That brings up another problem - the number of distros. The QA effort required for the Flex Builder (FB) on Linux project was huge indeed. And yes, we found problems that occurred only on Red Hat but not on Ubuntu, and so on. For example, clicking on help links in Eclipse on Red Hat opens a new window every time whereas it properly displays in the same window on Ubuntu. Again, it’s not really Eclipse’s fault. Go figure.

Then, there’s the issue of running Firefox. There’s nothing wrong with Firefox itself, but what’s with each distro trying to customize the Firefox startup script?! FB on Linux has to check whether the correct version of the Flash Player plugin is installed in the browser, and checking this is a long procedure - do we check in ~/.firefox/plugins/ directory or ~/.mozilla/plugins/ or $MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH or some Suse-distro-specific directory such as /usr/lib/browser-plugins/!

Life is simply too hard compared to other operating systems.

Isn’t it a wonder that nobody wants to develop a closed source product for Linux? Even Microsoft is just handing over the audio video codecs to Novell and letting them to do the hard work of creating Moonlight on Linux. Microsoft is smart enough not to try to maintain a Linux version of Silverlight on its own (I’m considering only technical issues, let’s set aside philosophical issues on this one).

If we really want to make Linux a good platform, then we need to stop messing around with the basics - at least please don’t muck up the basic shell scripts and paths.

The way to get more people, in large numbers, to understand the open source and free software philosophies is by making their first steps easy. It cannot be an all-or-nothing approach. Closed source software on Linux is not practical. And that’s a bad thing because if we can’t convert software developers to use a different platform, how can we expect mom and pop to switch to Linux?

In spite of all this, I think we’ve done a good job of FB on Linux, and happy to see all the great response we’ve seen so far, including reports of success on various distros that we’ve never even heard before. So please keep the feedback coming!

Standard disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own, not Adobe’s.

What’s your reason for living?

“We are in our best of times and our worst of times, trying as hard as we can to figure this whole thing out.” — The Quarter-Life Crisis.

Kamla Bhatt has been tracking the Hack Day India and posting many interviews and videos. The videos include the demos by the hackers, and here’s the video where we present (from minutes 03:10 to 05:09) :

Update : And a mention in the Financial Express

I was at Yahoo! Open Hack Day at Bangalore on Friday and Saturday. 24 hours of hacking, meeting lots of old friends, and sarcasm unlimited. It doesn’t get better than this.

• 2007-10-05 Fri 02:30 PM
  • Arrived at Taj.
  • Registered myself, got the schwag
  • Met Raghu and discussed the presentation he’ll be making on Flex
  • Social networking, the offline kind

• 2007-10-05 Fri 03:30 PM
  • The presentations start.
  • Joe starts the ceremonies.
  • Chris starts the first talk on what Yahoo can do for you. Yahoo APIs, that is.

• 2007-10-05 Fri 05:30 PM
  • On the fly, we three become a team : Pradeep, Raghu and myself.
  • Pradeep and myself know each other from Deep Root Linux projects, after college hours, in PESIT. Raghu and me are colleagues. Pradeep and Raghu met the first time today.
  • We start discussing ideas…
  • WiFi’s good

(more…)

Now presenting the alpha of the Flex Builder IDE on Linux! (this was announced at the Adobe MAX 2007 conference). You can now create Flex projects, write code with intellisense-like hinting, compile and debug all within an IDE based on Eclipse, on Linux. You heard it right, it’s officially supported by Adobe. Download it NOW.

The future direction of Flex Builder on Linux depends mostly on community feedback. Yes, seriously. So please do write in your feedback even if it is just “works well” or “it sucks”. Why is this important? The more the feedback, the more thought will be given to the product. This is how things work in Adobe (as far as I’ve seen). So again, voice your opinion on what you think of Flex Builder on Linux, and what you’d like to see and not see in it.

Disclosure: I am part of this project. I mostly handled the Linuxisms in the IDE functionality.

Update : Lots of feedback and comments (good to see that it’s mostly positive) on Digg, Slashdot and ZDNet. There’s also a video of the actual announcement put online by Peter Elst.

Two days before the BMS College Information Science Department Fest called “Genesis 2007″, I received an email from a couple of students asking me to talk about “introduction to open source”. Apparently, they were frantically looking for a speaker. Since I’m not the right person for this, I agreed to come only if they didn’t find someone else… and I ended up going there on Friday.

The talk was supposed to be an introduction for a day-long session on Open Source Hacking which was organized by few enthu students trying to get other students interested.

I started making the presentation on the midnight before Friday, so I didn’t have a very polished presentation, but I had something reasonable. The title of the talk was “How to make money from coding (or Why Open Source)”. That should get their attention.

15 minutes before the talk, there were 2 students in the hall. I wanted to start the talk on time and decided to start without much crowd anyway. My sore throat was troubling me and I was coughing every two minutes. Anyway, I started off with a funny anecdote. It flopped. Oh boy.

Then, I decided they’re not warmed up yet, and recovered quickly. 15 minutes later, the 225 seater hall was full. Phew.

An hour later, they were still all there, they were asking lots of questions and they seemed genuinely interested. I hope the students do take FOSS software seriously, if not for the freedom and open source aspects, at least for their own career aspects which I detailed out in the talk. (And I’m sure once they’re hooked, they will later “get” the freedom and open source aspects.)

Why do I say that? Well, it comes down to the first question in the Q&A session - “How to get into Yahoo!?”, and I replied “Well, do you want to know how I got into Yahoo!?”. A unanimous yes. I told them the MySQL story, the Python story and few other tidbits. Now, they’re really listening. I pointed out that I didn’t have any special skills, just the knowledge of these two open source software got me the job at Y!, and it saved me from a service industry job (no offense meant, just a personal preference).

Next question: “Any regrets in college life?”. It caused a flashback

in my mind on Atul’s words

“There are two times you innovate in your life - one is when you are a student, the other is when you retire.” Back then, I didn’t believe him. Now, I do. So, I told them “I haven’t yet regretted not scoring well in college. This is the only ‘free time’ you have, so use it well.” I got lot of smirks and “oh, please, we have so much to study” looks. I said “Two years later, I’ll see how many of you come back and tell me I’m wrong.”

Then, after the session ended, a few electrical students said they wanted to get into the software industry and don’t know where to start. I told them that some of the best programmers I’ve known are from a mechanical background, so that’s okay. You should prove your skills, that’s all, your background shouldn’t matter, although it may be difficult to get your first job because you’re not a computer science student. Then, a telecom student. I was happy about this guy because he said he wanted to remain in the telecom domain but learn coding really well, I said that’s a very good decision he’s taken and told him to see open source projects such as Asterisk and OpenMoko. He said “I’m in my final year, just 8 months to go, am I too late?” I said “8 months is a really long time, you’re not late, you just have to start now.” (8 months is a long time when you think about it, but it seems to fly away so soon).

After that, students headed towards the computer lab where I gave a crash course in using subversion. I had to get back to work, so I didn’t stay for the rest of the day, but I heard there was a “good response” from the students.

In the end, I don’t know if anyone was inspired about FOSS or not, but I did see that few students absorbed the fact that knowledge and projects are going to get them good jobs, not just marks (of course, you do have to have a decent score), and working on FOSS projects is one way to achieve that.

P.S. If you’ve read this far, and you’re interested in learning how to contribute to open source software, then you’re in luck, because the foss.in community event is coming up soon. You can start right now by reading Atul’s latest post on foss.in.

Update : A related must-read article is “How to Get a Job Like Mine” by Aaron Swartz.