Author : Manu Bansal
Copied from his IM status message, with permission.
Who comes, who goes
Why, where, nobody knows.
But the corridors,
they itch my nose,
the gap I close.
The desks are full,
the stacks are high,
lo and behold,
its pizza time!
I eat a slice, I fill some more,
why free food, nobody knows
back at work, I wonder still,
but on my cup, Microsoft grows!!
Reminds me of last 2 semesters at IITK. But I guess PhD aspirants working in labs day n’ night might relate to this better.
Continuing my post about business models for open source, here are some other things which make me think if open source is right way.
0) Well, as usual the first thing that I am able to think of is Office Suit. I am thinking of getting a tablet pc. I have wanted a touch screen laptop for long time time. Now, with touch screen I want to write notes and I want it to convert to text by itself. I owned a windows mobile for sometime. I used to use MS Word in it. And believe it or not, it was awesome. Handwriting recognition worked very good (after a small amount of practice, of course). Is there such thing in open source world? I bet not. Why not? Because it require research and lot of work. And then open sourcing it of course doesn’t make sense.
1) As all of you agree Evolution is a dead end. Thunderbird is good. I use Kontact though. I like to use default applications. This makes things look decent, and interconnectivity better. I did not shift to KDE4 untill KDE4.1 came. At 4.1, I expected things to work a little stable. Let me tell you a funny story about Kontact. In 4.1.0, if you close kill Kontact, you account information used to get vanish. Thankfully not the emails. So, you have to enter all the account settings again. In 4.1.4 things got improved, it stopped happening. But 2 days back, this happened again. I do not know why. I haven’t tried regenerating that problem. Another problem is that if I don’t give the kwallet password for sometime, it starts asking for password for accounts. Now this is ridiculous. There is no point asking for account password unless I am giving wrong password for kwallet. And when it ask for account password, and you don’t give it, rather you you logoff, it will ask for this password even if you give kwallet password. What a ridiculous sytem. You can not even properly store data. The worst part is the removal of all account settings. What a crappy thing must be going on inside that your data written in files is gone. Now this is called lack of structure. How did they even think of making a program which can remove data from a file. I am not able to think of any excuse for this problem.
2) PDF is an open standard. I use pdf a lot. But it seems that there is no proper software in ubuntu repository that could render pdf properly. I am mainly talking about different standard symbols used. Like ‘belong to’ sign, ‘equivalent’ sign and so on. Now these are very-very popular symbols. Open source people are not even able to support open standards, how worse can it get. (I tried using Okular and Evince, latest versions in ubuntu intrepid repositories.)
I was coming back from a meeting. I was standing in the bus stop chilling, waiting for the bus which was late. Then came this girl and a guy. I hardly noticed them. They stood in front of me. Girl was talking on phone. When she finished on phone she asked the guy what he did on weekend. The guy said “Nothing on Saturday. On Sunday I watched Slumdog Millionaire.” <pause> “Its a good movie”. The girl replied, “yeah its a good movie. The part which I was atleast was, was SO India.” <”So” with a stress>. I was standing there, I heard it. My next inpulse asked me to ask her what she knows about India. And those who know me, know that its natural for me. I would fight with this person. But to your surprise, and mine too, I didn’t say anything. I smiled. No, I laughed.
I laughed because some people still think that India is a land of snake. It is full of poverty and thats all it has. I laughed at the ignorance and unintellect of that person. This is specially significant here. Here as in America. Because America has lot of Indians. (I never noticed that untill I started looking at different research groups in academia and industry in general). And after this, if this person could still think that way, I am sorry for her. Now, I am not saying that the life shown in that movie is untrue. With good approximation I can say the story is true (not the millionaire part, but the slum life). But is this India? Oh, not just India, she said “*so India*”.
When I read this post, I thought its just exaggeration, but guess what? I was wrong.