Where Would You Like 100,000 Users to Go Today?

Bdale Garbee

HP Linux CTO

Mars?

Direct Reception of Signals from Mars

G3WDG successfully receiving signals from Mars...

Mars Odyssey and Mars Express both heard directly

3m dish, 0.8dB noise figure, 84k system noise temperature

Mars Odyssey, and... Mars Express...

Objectives

Try something a little different ... well, ok, maybe not all that different...

Report on some very exciting things I've seen during my travels to speak about Linux around the world

Share my conjectures about underlying motivations

In the process, perhaps you'll come to understand why I remain so undauntably optimistic about the future of Free Software and the positive impact that our collected work is having.

Commons

The dictionary says that a “Commons” is:

A public pasture ground

A piece of open land for recreational use in an urban area

Governments as caretakers of various commons.

The provisions of licenses like the GPL, and the community development model that they encourage, create a commons for software.

The Tragedy of the Commons

an idea at least as old as Aristotle

popularized by Garrett James Hardin, 1915-2003

assumes that the resources of the commons are limited

The Free Software commons has no such limitations!

Community

The dictionary defines “community” as:

A body of people having common rights, privileges, or interests, or living in the same place under the same laws and regulations.

Of common character, likeness, frequency

The Internet enables the formation of a new class of communities that could not previously exist.

People with common interests or values

Potentially broadly geographically distributed

Inability to participate in the growing society of Internet-enabled communities is a fundamental problem, often called the “digital divide”

On my first trip to Brazil...

A startling thing happened when I walked onto the vendor floor at the Forum International Software Livre...

A representative of the city government handed me a CD, the label of which said “Porto Alegre GNU/Linux”, with four interesting logos on it:

Debian-RS

The City of Porto Alegre

The State of Rio Grande do Sul

The Country of Brazil

Several thousand copies have been distributed to citizens of the region (3000 at FISL 2003 alone!).

The former governor of this state is now the president...

Extremadura

A region in the South-West of Spain, near the Portugese border, with a population of about one million people.

One of the poorest regions in Spain, facing difficult economic challenges.

A place where 80,000 Linux desktop computers have been deployed, one for every two students in the public school system!

A model for successful large-scale Linux deployments in government and education that many hope to duplicate.

LinEx

There was nothing “quick” or “easy” about how the government of Extremadura went about this deployment!

5 years, designing and implementing comprehensive plans

LinEx is the Debian-derived Linux distribution created in Extremadura as a key component of their Technology Literacy Plan, and the Educational Technology Network project started in 1998.

Beyond traditional localization, interface menus apply local dialect and idiom...

In addition to 80,000 desktops deployed in the schools, over 20,000 live-run CDROMs have been distributed to ordinary citizens!

Andalucia

The region of Spain including Seville

Planning an Extremadura-like massive Linux deployment

Building a Debian-derived distribution of their own, starting with LinEx and using Metadistros.

www.guadalinex.org

Over 30,000 CDROMs deployed to ordinary citizens, in advance of the planned educational and government office deployments...

And other regions of Spain, like the Canary Islands, are watching and planning similar deployments...

Debian?

What is Debian?

'The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system.'

More specifically, Debian:

is one of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions

runs on the most architectures

is a completely open volunteer organization

is quite international

is the largest GNU/Linux distribution

works with companies to develop and maintain software

is Focused on Freedom

is well represented in the Free Software world

Evolution of the Debian Community

Ian Murdock's Debian Manifesto attracted people excited by the idea of Free Software to join the project

The Social Contract and associated Debian Free Software Guidelines articulated the core set of shared values of the growing Debian community. Acceptance of these values became a criteria for acceptance into the community.

As the community continued to evolve, a constitution was drafted to clarify roles and responsibilities, and to provide for conflict resolution and decision making.

The Debian community continues to evolve, but the results already speak for themselves...

A Few Debian Statistics

Debian runs on everything from handhelds to mainframes

11 released architectures

alpha arm hppa i386 ia64 m68k mips[el] powerpc s390 sparc

port underway to AMD Opteron

also working with HURD and BSD kernels

Debian's technology, policies, and packages form the basis for a rich variety of custom and derived distributions.

1268 people

8103 source packages

13739 binary packages

Number of Debian Developers

Map of Debian Developers

Number of Debian Source Packages

Map of Debian Users

Recent Awards

Linux Journal 2003 Readers' Choice Awards

Debian won the category of “Favourite Distribution”

Linux Enterprise Reader's Choice 2003

Debian won the category “Best Enterprise Distribution”

Linux New Media Award 2003

Debian won the category “Best Distribution”

Along with Knoppix, which is derived from Debian, they received more than 60% of the votes.

So, what does this all mean?

HP’s Linux commitment

“The question for us isn’t, ‘Will Linux dominate the world? ‘, but ‘What part
of the world will Linux dominate? ‘”

Carly Fiorina
CEO, Hewlett Packard Company
Linuxworld 2002

Conclusions

Free Software makes sense to many governments

The freedom to pick and choose, and customize/localize

Investments

Less total cost than proprietary software

Local investments in education and building a software industry are better than sending hard currency overseas.

Successful large-scale public deployments of Linux don't “just happen”

Political and economic will are required

Big projects take time ... Extremadura started in 1998!

Many such deployments are now in the discussion and planning stages

More Conclusions

We should not be surprised that Debian is often chosen

Open and inclusive, focus on Freedom

Existence proof for the community development model

The core values associated with Free Software attract strong support.

People, hardware, and bandwidth...

Direct investment in development, integration, and deployment by governments and educational institutions.

Debian continues to be one of the most successful volunteer projects ever.

Well over 1000 VOLUNTEERS around the world.

Delivering real value to meet real world needs.

To Learn More

Debian project web site www.debian.org

HP

Linux product information starts at www.hp.com/linux

Many HP supported Open Source projects (Debian, Samba, etc) are referenced at opensource.hp.com

Linux for iPAQ – handhelds.org

Bdale's talks go online at www.gag.com/~bdale/talks

www.amsat.org

www.sucklingfamily.free-online.co.uk/mars_express.htm

hp’s Linux Strategy: “Strategic investments, which facilitate enterprise success …”

Now that you have a feel for the “where” and “why” of Linux market adoption, allow me to shift gears and share with you the “what” hp is doing.

hp’s Linux strategy is founded on the seven precepts depicted and, for us, it’s all about making the right set of strategic investments that will facilitate enterprise success with Linux. Within hp, we call these our proof points because each one of these represent areas demanding significant business focus and corresponding resource investment aimed at creating and delivering Linux-specific value to the Enterprise.

UNIX® is a registered trademark of The Open Group.

Slide 1

Martin Fink

2003-01-15T08:05:02