Paul Boddie's Free Software-related blog

I seem to be spending too much time looking into obscure tales from computing history, but continuing an earlier tangent from a recent article, noting the performance of different computer systems at the end of the 1980s and the start of the 1990s, I found myself evaluating one of those Internet rumours that probably started to do the rounds about thirty years ago. We will get to that rumour – a tall tale, indeed – in a moment. But first, a chart that I posted in an earlier article:

Performance evolution of the Archimedes and various competitors

As this nice chart indicates, comparing processor performance in computers from Acorn, Apple, Commodore and Compaq, different processor families bestowed a competitive advantage on particular systems at various points in time. For a while, Acorn’s ARM2 processor gave Acorn’s Archimedes range the edge over much more expensive systems using the Intel 80386, showcased in Compaq’s top-of-the-line models, as well as offerings from Apple and Commodore, these relying on Motorola’s 68000 family. One can, in fact, claim that a comparison between ARM-based systems and 80386-based systems would have been unfair to Acorn: more similarly priced systems from PC-compatible vendors would have used the much slower 80286, making the impact of the ARM2 even more remarkable.

Something might be said about the evolution of these processor families, what happened after 1993, and the introduction of later products. Such topics are difficult to address adequately for a number of reasons, principally the absence of appropriate benchmark results and the evolution of benchmarking to more accurately reflect system performance. Acorn never published SPEC benchmark figures, nor did ARM (at the time, at least), and any given benchmark as an approximation to “real-world” computing activities inevitably drifts away from being an accurate approximation as computer system architecture evolves.

However, in another chart I made to cover Acorn’s Unix-based RISC iX workstations, we can consider another range of competitors and quite a different situation. (This chart also shows off the nice labelling support in gnuplot that wasn’t possible with the currently disabled MediaWiki graph extension.)

Performance of the Acorn R-series and various competitors in approximate chronological order of introduction: a chart produced by gnuplot and converted from SVG to PNG for Wikipedia usage.

Now, this chart only takes us from 1989 until 1992, which will not satisfy anyone wondering what happened next in the processor wars. But it shows the limits of Acorn’s ability to enter the lucrative Unix workstation market with a processor that was perceived to be rather fast in the world of personal computers. Acorn’s R140 used the same ARM2 processor introduced in the Archimedes range, but even at launch this workstation proved to be considerably slower than somewhat more expensive workstation models from Digital and Sun employing MIPS and SPARC processors respectively.

Fortunately for Acorn, adding a cache to the ARM2 (plus a few other things) to make the ARM3 unlocked a considerable boost in performance. Although the efficient utilisation of available memory bandwidth had apparently been a virtue for the ARM designers, coupling the processor to memory performance had put a severe limit on overall performance. Meanwhile, the designers of the MIPS and SPARC processor families had started out with a different perspective and had considered cache memory almost essential in the kind of computer architectures that would be using these processors.

Acorn didn’t make another Unix workstation after the R260, released in 1990, for reasons that could be explored in depth another time. One of them, however, was that ARM processor design had been spun out to a separate company, ARM Limited, and appeared to be stalling in terms of delivering performance improvements at the same rate as previously, or indeed at the same rate as other processor families. Acorn did introduce the ARM610 belatedly in 1994 in its Risc PC, which would have been more amenable to running Unix, but by then the company was arguably beginning the process of unravelling for another set of reasons to be explored another time.

So, That Tall Tale

It is against this backdrop of competitive considerations that I now bring you the tall tale to which I referred. Having been reminded of the Atari Transputer Workstation by a video about the Transputer – another fascinating topic and thus another rabbit hole to explore – I found myself investigating Atari’s other workstation product: a Unix workstation based on the Motorola 68030 known as the Atari TT030 or TT/X, augmenting the general Atari TT product with the Unix System V operating system.

On the chart above, a 68030-based system would sit at a similar performance level to Acorn’s R140, so ignoring aspirational sentiments about “high-end” performance and concentrating on a price of around $3000 (with a Unix licence probably adding to that figure), there were some hopes that Atari’s product would reach a broad audience:

As a UNIX platform, the affordable TT030 may leapfrog machines from IBM, Apple, NeXT, and Sun, as the best choice for mass installation of UNIX systems in these environments.

As it turned out, Atari released the TT without Unix in 1990 and only eventually shipped a Unix implementation in around 1992, discontinuing the endeavour not long afterwards. But the tall tale is not about Atari: it is about their rivals at Commodore and some bizarre claims that seem to have drifted around the Internet for thirty years.

Like Atari and Acorn, Commodore also had designs on the Unix workstation market. And like Atari, Commodore had a range of microcomputers, the Amiga series, based on the 68000 processor family. So, the natural progression for Commodore was to design a model of the Amiga to run Unix, eventually giving us the Amiga 3000UX, priced from around $5000, running an implementation of Unix System V Release 4 branded as “Amiga Unix”.

Reactions from the workstation market were initially enthusiastic but later somewhat tepid. Commodore’s product, although delivered in a much more timely fashion than Atari’s, will also have found itself sitting at a similar performance level to Acorn’s R140 but positioned chronologically amongst the group including Acorn’s much faster R260 and the 80486-based models. It goes without saying that Atari’s eventual product would have been surrounded by performance giants by the time customers could run Unix on it, demonstrating the need to bring products to market on time.

So what is this tall tale, then? Well, it revolves around this not entirely coherent remark, entered by some random person twenty-one years ago on the emerging resource known as Wikipedia:

The Amiga A3000UX model even got the attention of Sun Microsystems, but unfortunately Commodore did not jump at the A3000UX.

If you search the Web for this, including the Internet Archive, the most you will learn is that Sun Microsystems were supposedly interested in adopting the Amiga 3000UX as a low-cost workstation. But the basis of every report of this supposed interest always seems to involve “talk” about a “deal” and possibly “interest” from unspecified “people” at Sun Microsystems. And, of course, the lack of any eventual deal is often blamed on Commodore’s management and perennial villain of the Amiga scene…

There were talks of Sun Microsystems selling Amiga Unix machines (the prototype Amiga 3500) as a low-end Unix workstations under their brand, making Commodore their OEM manufacturer. This deal was let down by Commodore’s Mehdi Ali, not once but twice and finally Sun gave up their interest.

Of course, back in 2003, anything went on Wikipedia. People thought “I know this!” or “I heard something about this!”, clicked the edit link, and scrawled away, leaving people to tidy up the mess two decades later. So, I assume that this tall tale is just the usual enthusiast community phenomenon of believing that a favourite product could really have been a contender, that legitimacy could have been bestowed on their platform, and that their favourite company could have regained some of its faded glory. Similar things happened as Acorn went into decline, too.

Picking It All Apart

When such tales appeal to both intuition and even-handed consideration, they tend to retain a veneer of credibility: of being plausible and therefore possibly true. I cannot really say whether the tale is actually true, only that there is no credible evidence of it being true. However, it is still worth evaluating the details within such tales on their merits and determine whether the substance really sounds particularly likely at all.

So, why would Sun Microsystems be interested in a Commodore workstation product? Here, it helps to review Sun’s own product range during the 1980s, to note that Sun had based its original workstation on the Motorola 68000 and had eventually worked up the 68000 family to the 68030 in its Sun-3 products. Indeed, the final Sun-3 products were launched in 1989, not too long before the Amiga 3000UX came to market. But the crucial word in the previous sentence is “final”: Sun had adopted the SPARC processor family and had started introducing SPARC-based models two years previously. Like other workstation vendors, Sun had started to abandon Motorola’s processors, seeking better performance elsewhere.

A June 1989 review in Personal Workstation magazine is informative, featuring the 68030-based Sun 3/80 workstation alongside Sun’s SPARCstation 1. For diskless machines, the Sun 3/80 came in at around $6000 whereas the SPARCstation 1 came in at around $9000. For that extra $3000, the buyer was probably getting around four times the performance, and it was quite an incentive for Sun’s customers and developers to migrate to SPARC on that basis alone. But even for customers holding on to their older machines and wanting to augment their collection with some newer models, Sun was offering something not far off the “low-cost” price of an Amiga 3000UX with hardware that was probably more optimised for the role.

Sun will have supported customers using these Sun-3 models for as long as support for SunOS was available, eventually introducing Solaris which dropped support for the 68000 family architecture entirely. Just like other Unix hardware vendors, once a transition to various RISC architectures had been embarked upon, there was little enthusiasm for going back and retooling to support the Motorola architecture again. And, after years resisting, even Motorola was embracing RISC with its 88000 architecture, tempting companies like NeXT and Apple to consider trading up from the 68000 family: an adventure that deserves its own treatment, too.

So, under what circumstances would Sun have seriously considered adopting Commodore’s product? On the face of it, the potential compatibility sounds enticing, and Commodore will have undoubtedly asserted that they had experience at producing low-cost machines in volume, appealing to Sun’s estimate, expressed in the Personal Workstation review, that the customer base for a low-cost workstation would double for every $1000 drop in price. And surely Sun would have been eager to close the doors on manufacturing a product line that was going to be phased out sooner or later, so why not let Commodore keep making low-cost models to satisfy existing customers?

First of all, we might well doubt any claims to be able to produce workstations significantly cheaper than those already available. The Amiga 3000UX was, as noted, only $1000 or so cheaper than the Sun 3/80. Admittedly, it had a hard drive as standard, making the comparison slightly unfair, but then the Sun 3/80 was around already in 1989, meaning that to be fair to that product, we would need to see how far its pricing will have fallen by the time the Amiga 3000UX became available. Commodore certainly had experience in shipping large volumes of relatively inexpensive computers like the Amiga 500, but they were not shipping workstation-class machines in large quantities, and the eventual price of the Amiga 3000UX indicates that such arguments about volume do not automatically confer low cost onto more expensive products.

Even if we imagine that the Amiga 3000UX had been successfully cost-reduced and made more competitive, we then need to ask what benefits there would have been for the customer, for developers, and for Sun in selling such a product. It seems plausible to imagine customers with substantial investments in software that only ran on Sun’s older machines, who might have needed newer, compatible hardware to keep that software running. Perhaps, in such cases, the suppliers of such software were not interested or capable of porting the software to the SPARC processor family. Those customers might have kept buying machines to replace old ones or to increase the number of “seats” in their environment.

But then again, we could imagine that such customers, having multiple machines and presumably having them networked together, could have benefited from augmenting their old Motorola machines with new SPARC ones, potentially allowing the SPARC machines to run a suitable desktop environment and to use the old applications over the network. In such a scenario, the faster SPARC machines would have been far preferable as workstations, and with the emergence of the X Window System, a still lower-cost alternative would have been to acquire X terminals instead.

We might also question how many software developers would have been willing to abandon their users on an old architecture when it had been clear for some time that Sun would be transitioning to SPARC. Indeed, by producing versions of the same operating system for both architectures, one can argue that Sun was making it relatively straightforward for software vendors to prepare for future products and the eventual deprecation of their old products. Moreover, given the performance benefits of Sun’s newer hardware, developers might well have been eager to complete their own transition to SPARC and to entice customers to follow rapidly, if such enticement was even necessary.

Consequently, if there were customers stuck on Sun’s older hardware running applications that had been effectively abandoned, one could be left wondering what the scale of the commercial opportunity was in selling those customers more of the same. From a purely cynical perspective, given the idiosyncracies of Sun’s software platform from time to time, it is quite possible that such customers would have struggled to migrate to another 68000 family Unix platform. And even without such portability issues and with the chance of running binaries on a competing Unix, the departure of many workstation vendors to other architectures may have left relatively few appealing options. The most palatable outcome might have been to migrate to other applications instead and to then look at the hardware situation with fresh eyes.

And we keep needing to return to that matter of performance. A 68030-based machine was arguably unappealing, like 80386-based systems, clearing the bar for workstation computing but not by much. If the cost of such a machine could have been reduced to an absurdly low price point then one could have argued that it might have provided an accessible entry point for users into a vendor’s “ecosystem”. Indeed, I think that companies like Commodore and Acorn should have put Unix-like technology in their low-end products, harmonising them with higher-end products actually running Unix, and having their customers gradually migrate as more powerful computers became cheaper.

But for workstations running what one commentator called “wedding-cake configurations” of the X Window System, graphical user interface toolkits, and applications, processors like the 68030, 80386 and ARM2 were going to provide a disappointing experience whatever the price. Meanwhile, Sun’s existing workstations were a mature product with established peripherals and accessories. Any cost-reduced workstation would have been something distinct from those existing products, impaired in performance terms and yet unable to make use of things like graphics accelerators which might have made the experience tolerable.

That then raises the question of the availability of the 68040. Could Commodore have boosted the Amiga 3000UX with that processor, bringing it up to speed with the likes of the ARM3-based R260 and 80486-based products, along with the venerable MIPS R2000 and early SPARC processors? Here, we can certainly answer in the affirmative, but then we must ask what this would have done to the price. The 68040 was a new product, arriving during 1990, and although competitively priced relative to the SPARC and 80486, it was still quoted at around $800 per unit, featuring in Apple’s Macintosh range in models that initially, in 1991, cost over $5000. Such a cost increase would have made it hard to drive down the system price.

In the chart above, the HP 9000/425t represents possibly the peak of 68040 workstation performance – “a formidable entry-level system” – costing upwards of $9000. But as workstation performance progressed, represented by new generations of DECstations and SPARCstations, the 68040 stalled, unable to be clocked significantly faster or otherwise see its performance scaled up. Prominent users such as Apple jumped ship and adopted PowerPC along with Motorola themselves! Motorola returned to the architecture after abandoning further development of the 88000 architecture, delivering the 68060 before finally consigning the architecture to the embedded realm.

In the end, even if a competitively priced and competitively performing workstation had been deliverable by Commodore, would it have been in Sun’s interests to sell it? Compatibility with older software might have demanded the continued development of SunOS and the extension of support for older software technologies. SunOS might have needed porting to Commodore’s hardware, or if Sun were content to allow Commodore to add any necessary provision to its own Unix implementation, then porting of those special Sun technologies would have been required. One can question whether the customer experience would have been satisfactory in either case. And for Sun, the burden of prolonging the lifespan of products that were no longer the focus of the company might have made the exercise rather unattractive.

Companies can always choose for themselves how much support they might extend to their different ranges of products. Hewlett-Packard maintained several lines of workstation products and continued to maintain a line of 68030 and 68040 workstations even after introducing their own PA-RISC processor architecture. After acquiring Apollo Computer, who had also begun to transition to their own RISC architecture from the 68000 family, HP arguably had an obligation to Apollo’s customers and thus renewed their commitment to the Motorola architecture, particularly since Apollo’s own RISC architecture, PRISM, was shelved by HP in favour of PA-RISC.

It is perhaps in the adoption of Sun technology that we might establish the essence of this tale. Amiga Unix was provided with Sun’s OPEN LOOK graphical user interface, and this might have given people reason to believe that there was some kind of deeper alliance. In fact, the alliance was really between Sun and AT&T, attempting to define Unix standards and enlisting the support of Unix suppliers. In seeking to adhere most closely to what could be regarded as traditional Unix – that defined by its originator, AT&T – Commodore may well have been picking technologies that also happened to be developed by Sun.

This tale rests on the assumption that Sun was not able to drive down the prices of its own workstations and that Commodore was needed to lead the way. Yet workstation prices were already being driven down by competition. Already by May 1990, Sun had announced the diskless SPARCstation SPC at the magic $5000 price point, although its lowest-cost colour workstation was reportedly the SPARCstation IPC at a much more substantial $10000. Nevertheless, its competitors were quite able to demonstrate colour workstations at reasonable prices, and eventually Sun followed their lead. Meanwhile, the Amiga 3000UX cost almost $8000 when coupled with a colour monitor.

With such talk of commodity hardware, it must not be forgotten that Sun was not without other options. For example, the company had already delivered SunOS on the Sun386i workstation in 1988. Although rather expensive, costing $10000, and not exactly a generic PC clone, it did support PC architecture standards. This arguably showed the way if the company were to target a genuine commodity hardware platform, and eventually Sun followed this path when making its Solaris operating system available for the Intel x86 architecture. But had Sun had a desperate urge to target commodity hardware back in 1990, partnering with a PC clone manufacturer would have been a more viable option than repurposing an Amiga model. That clone manufacturer could have been Commodore, too, but other choices would have been more convincing.

Conclusions and Reflections

What can we make of all of this? An idle assertion with a veneer of plausibility and a hint of glory denied through the notoriously poor business practices of the usual suspects. Well, we can obviously see that nothing is ever as simple as it might seem, particularly if we indulge every last argument and pursue every last avenue of consideration. And yet, the matter of Commodore making a Unix workstation and Sun Microsystems being “interested in rebadging the A3000UX” might be as simple as imagining a rather short meeting where Commodore representatives present this opportunity and Sun’s representatives firmly but politely respond that the door has been closed on a product range not long for retirement. Thanks but no thanks. The industry has moved on. Did you not get that memo?

Given that there is the essence of a good story in all of this, I consulted what might be the first port of call for Commodore stories: David Pleasance’s book, “Commodore The Inside Story”. Sadly, I can find no trace of any such interaction, with Unix references relating to a much earlier era and Commodore’s Z8000-based Unix machine, the unreleased Commodore 900. Yet, had such a bungled deal occurred, I am fairly sure that this book would lay out the fiasco in plenty of detail. Even Dave Haynie’s chapter, which covers development of the Amiga 3000 and subsequent projects, fails to mention any such dealings. Perhaps the catalogue of mishaps at Commodore is so extensive that a lucrative agreement with one of the most prominent corporations in 1990s computing does not merit a mention.

Interestingly, the idea of a low-cost but relatively low-performance 68030-based workstation from a major Unix workstation vendor did arrive in 1989 in the form of the Apollo DN2500, costing $4000, from Hewlett-Packard. Later on, Commodore would apparently collaborate with HP on chipset development, with this being curtailed by Commodore’s bankruptcy. Commodore were finally moving off the 68000 family architecture themselves, all rather too late to turn their fortunes around. Did Sun need a competitive 68040-based workstation? Although HP’s 9000/425 range was amongst the top sellers, Sun was doing nicely enough with its SPARC-based products, shipping over twice as many workstations as HP.

While I consider this tall tale to be nothing more than folklore, like the reminiscences of football supporters whose team always had a shot at promotion to the bigger league every season, “not once but twice” has a specificity that either suggests a kernel of truth or is a clever embellishment to sustain a group’s collective belief in something that never was. Should anyone know the real story, please point us to the documentation. Or, if there never was any paper trail but you happened to be there, please write it up and let us all know. But please don’t just go onto Wikipedia and scrawl it in the tradition of “I know this!”

For the record, I did look around to see if anyone recorded such corporate interactions on Sun’s side. That yielded no evidence, but I did find something else that was rather intriguing: hints that Sun may have been advised to try and acquire Acorn or ARM. Nothing came from that, of course, but at least this is documentation of an interaction in the corporate world. Of stories about something that never happened, it might also be a more interesting one than the Commodore workstation that Sun never got to rebadge.

Update: I did find a mention of Sun Microsystems and Unix International featuring the Amiga 3000UX on their exhibition stands at the Uniforum conference in early 1991. As noted above, Sun had an interest in promoting adoption of OPEN LOOK, and Unix International – the Sun/AT&T initiative to define Unix standards – had an interest in promoting System V Release 4 and, to an extent, OPEN LOOK. So, while the model may have “even got the attention of Sun Microsystems”, it was probably just a nice way of demonstrating vendor endorsement of Sun’s technology from a vendor who admitted that what it could offer was not “competitive with Sun” and what it had to offer.

I have previously written about the EOMA68 initiative and its objective of making small, modular computing cards that conform to a well-defined standard which can be plugged into certain kinds of device – a laptop or desktop computer, or maybe even a tablet or smartphone – providing a way of supplying such devices with the computing power they all need. This would also offer a convenient way of taking your computing environment with you, using it in the kind of device that makes most sense at the time you need to use it, since the computer card is the actual computer and all you are doing is putting it in a different box: switch off, unplug the card, plug it into something else, switch that on, and your “computer” has effectively taken on a different form.

(This “take your desktop with you” by actually taking your computer with you is fundamentally different to various dubious “cloud synchronisation” services that would claim to offer something similar: “now you can synchronise your tablet with your PC!”, or whatever. Such services tend to operate rather imperfectly – storing your files on some remote site – and, of course, exposing you to surveillance and convenience issues.)

Well, a crowd-funding campaign has since been launched to fund a number of EOMA68-related products, with an opportunity for those interested to acquire the first round of computer cards and compatible devices, those devices being a “micro-desktop” that offers a simple “mini PC” solution, together with a somewhat radically designed and produced laptop (or netbook, perhaps) that emphasises accessible construction methods (home 3D printing) and alternative material usage (“eco-friendly plywood”). In the interests of transparency, I will admit that I have pledged for a card and the micro-desktop, albeit via my brother for various personal reasons that also delayed me from actually writing about this here before now.

An EOMA68 computer card in a wallet (courtesy Rhombus Tech/Crowd Supply)

Of course, EOMA68 is about more than just conveniently taking your computer with you because it is now small enough to fit in a wallet. Even if you do not intend to regularly move your computer card from device to device, it emphasises various sustainability issues such as power consumption (deliberately kept low), long-term support and matters of freedom (the selection of CPUs that completely support Free Software and do not introduce surveillance backdoors), and device longevity (that when the user wants to upgrade, they may easily use the card in something else that might benefit from it).

This is not modularity to prove some irrelevant hypothesis. It is modularity that delivers concrete benefits to users (that they aren’t forced to keep replacing products engineered for obsolescence), to designers and manufacturers (that they can rely on the standard to provide computing functionality and just focus on their own speciality to differentiate their product in more interesting ways), and to society and the environment (by reducing needless consumption and waste caused by the upgrade treadmill promoted by the technology industries over the last few decades).

One might think that such benefits might be received with enthusiasm. Sadly, it says a lot about today’s “needy consumer” culture that instead of welcoming another choice, some would rather spend their time criticising it, often to the point that one might wonder about their motivations for doing so. Below, I present some common criticisms and some of my own remarks.

(If you don’t want to read about “first world” objections – typically about “new” and “fast” – and are already satisfied by the decisions made regarding more understandable concerns – typically involving corporate behaviour and licensing – just skip to the last section.)

“The A20 is so old and slow! What’s the point?”

The Allwinner A20 has been around for a while. Indeed, its predecessor – the A10 – was the basis of initial iterations of the computer card several years ago. Now, the amount of engineering needed to upgrade the prototypes that were previously made to use the A10 instead of the A20 is minimal, at least in comparison to adopting another CPU (that would probably require a redesign of the circuit board for the card). And hardware prototyping is expensive, especially when unnecessary design changes have to be made, when they don’t always work out as expected, and when extra rounds of prototypes are then required to get the job done. For an initiative with a limited budget, the A20 makes a lot of sense because it means changing as little as possible, benefiting from the functionality upgrade and keeping the risks low.

Obviously, there are faster processors available now, but as the processor selection criteria illustrate, if you cannot support them properly with Free Software and must potentially rely on binary blobs which potentially violate the GPL, it would be better to stick to a more sustainable choice (because that is what adherence to Free Software is largely about) even if that means accepting reduced performance. In any case, at some point, other cards with different processors will come along and offer faster performance. Alternatively, someone will make a dual-slot product that takes two cards (or even a multi-slot product that provides a kind of mini-cluster), and then with software that is hopefully better-equipped for concurrency, there will be alternative ways of improving the performance to that of finding faster processors and hoping that they meet all the practical and ethical criteria.

“The RasPi 3…”

Lots of people love the Raspberry Pi, it would seem. The original models delivered a cheap, adequate desktop computer for a sum that was competitive even with some microcontroller-based single-board computers that are aimed at electronics projects and not desktop computing, although people probably overlook rivals like the BeagleBoard and variants that would probably have occupied a similar price point even if the Raspberry Pi had never existed. Indeed, the BeagleBone Black resides in the same pricing territory now, as do many other products. It is interesting that both product families are backed by certain semiconductor manufacturers, and the Raspberry Pi appears to benefit from privileged access to Broadcom products and employees that is denied to others seeking to make solutions using the same SoC (system on a chip).

Now, the first Raspberry Pi models were not entirely at the performance level of contemporary desktop solutions, especially by having only 256MB or 512MB RAM, meaning that any desktop experience had to be optimised for the device. Furthermore, they employed an ARM architecture variant that was not fully supported by mainstream GNU/Linux distributions, in particular the one favoured by the initiative: Debian. So a variant of Debian has been concocted to support the devices – Raspbian – and despite the Raspberry Pi 2 being the first device in the series to employ an architecture variant that is fully supported by Debian, Raspbian is still recommended for it and its successor.

Anyway, the Raspberry Pi 3 having 1GB RAM and being several times faster than the earliest models might be more competitive with today’s desktop solutions, at least for modestly-priced products, and perhaps it is faster than products using the A20. But just like the fascination with MHz and GHz until Intel found that it couldn’t rely on routinely turning up the clock speed on its CPUs, or everybody emphasising the number of megapixels their digital camera had until they discovered image noise, such number games ignore other factors: the closed source hardware of the Raspberry Pi boards, the opaque architecture of the Broadcom SoCs with a closed source operating system running on the GPU (graphics processing unit) that has control over the ARM CPU running the user’s programs, the impracticality of repurposing the device for things like laptops (despite people attempting to repurpose it for such things, anyway), and the organisation behind the device seemingly being happy to promote a variety of unethical proprietary software from a variety of unethical vendors who clearly want a piece of the action.

And finally, with all the fuss about how much faster the opaque Broadcom product is than the A20, the Raspberry Pi 3 has half the RAM of the EOMA68-A20 computer card. For certain applications, more RAM is going to be much more helpful than more cores or “64-bit!”, which makes us wonder why the Raspberry Pi 3 doesn’t support 4GB RAM or more. (Indeed, the current trend of 64-bit ARM products offering memory quantities addressable by 32-bit CPUs seems to have missed the motivation for x86 finally going 64-bit back in the early 21st century, which was largely about efficiently supporting the increasingly necessary amounts of RAM required for certain computing tasks, with Intel’s name for x86-64 actually being at one time “Extended Memory 64 Technology“. Even the DEC Alpha, back in the 1990s, which could be regarded as heralding the 64-bit age in mainstream computing, and which arguably relied on the increased performance provided by a 64-bit architecture for its success, still supported 64-bit quantities of memory in delivered products when memory was obviously a lot more expensive than it is now.)

“But the RasPi Zero!”

Sure, who can argue with a $5 (or £4, or whatever) computer with 512MB RAM and a 1GHz CPU that might even be a usable size and shape for some level of repurposing for the kinds of things that EOMA68 aims at: putting a general purpose computer into a wide range of devices? Except that the Raspberry Pi Zero has had persistent availability issues, even ignoring the free give-away with a magazine that had people scuffling in newsagents to buy up all the available copies so they could resell them online at several times the retail price. And it could be perceived as yet another inventory-dumping exercise by Broadcom, given that it uses the same SoC as the original Raspberry Pi.

Arguably, the Raspberry Pi Zero is a more ambiguous follow-on from the Raspberry Pi Compute Module that obviously was (and maybe still is) intended for building into other products. Some people may wonder why the Compute Module wasn’t the same success as the earlier products in the Raspberry Pi line-up. Maybe its lack of success was because any organisation thinking of putting the Compute Module (or, these days, the Pi Zero) in a product to sell to other people is relying on a single vendor. And with that vendor itself relying on a single vendor with whom it currently has a special relationship, a chain of single vendor reliance is formed.

Any organisation wanting to build one of these boards into their product now has to have rather a lot of confidence that the chain will never weaken or break and that at no point will either of those vendors decide that they would rather like to compete in that particular market themselves and exploit their obvious dominance in doing so. And they have to be sure that the Raspberry Pi Foundation doesn’t suddenly decide to get out of the hardware business altogether and pursue those educational objectives that they once emphasised so much instead, or that the Foundation and its manufacturing partners don’t decide for some reason to cease doing business, perhaps selectively, with people building products around their boards.

“Allwinner are GPL violators and will never get my money!”

Sadly, Allwinner have repeatedly delivered GPL-licensed software without providing the corresponding source code, and this practice may even persist to this day. One response to this has referred to the internal politics and organisation of Allwinner and that some factions try to do the right thing while others act in an unenlightened, licence-violating fashion.

Let it be known that I am no fan of the argument that there are lots of departments in companies and that just because some do some bad things doesn’t mean that you should punish the whole company. To this day, Sony does not get my business because of the unsatisfactorily-resolved rootkit scandal and I am hardly alone in taking this position. (It gets brought up regularly on a photography site I tend to visit where tensions often run high between Sony fanatics and those who use cameras from other manufacturers, but to be fair, Sony also has other ways of irritating its customers.) And while people like to claim that Microsoft has changed and is nice to Free Software, even to the point where people refusing to accept this assertion get criticised, it is pretty difficult to accept claims of change and improvement when the company pulls in significant sums from shaking down device manufacturers using dubious patent claims on Android and Linux: systems it contributed nothing to. And no, nobody will have been reading any patents to figure out how to implement parts of Android or Linux, let alone any belonging to some company or other that Microsoft may have “vacuumed up” in an acquisition spree.

So, should the argument be discarded here as well? Even though I am not too happy about Allwinner’s behaviour, there is the consideration that as the saying goes, “beggars cannot be choosers”. When very few CPUs exist that meet the criteria desirable for the initiative, some kind of nasty compromise may have to be made. Personally, I would have preferred to have had the option of the Ingenic jz4775 card that was close to being offered in the campaign, although I have seen signs of Ingenic doing binary-only code drops on certain code-sharing sites, and so they do not necessarily have clean hands, either. But they are actually making the source code for such binaries available elsewhere, however, if you know where to look. Thus it is most likely that they do not really understand the precise obligations of the software licences concerned, as opposed to deliberately withholding the source code.

But it may well be that unlike certain European, American and Japanese companies for whom the familiar regime of corporate accountability allows us to judge a company on any wrongdoing, because any executives unaware of such wrongdoing have been negligent or ineffective at building the proper processes of supervision and thus permit an unethical corporate culture, and any executives aware of such wrongdoing have arguably cultivated an unethical corporate culture themselves, it could be the case that Chinese companies do not necessarily operate (or are regulated) on similar principles. That does not excuse unethical behaviour, but it might at least entertain the idea that by supporting an ethical faction within a company, the unethical factions may be weakened or even eliminated. If that really is how the game is played, of course, and is not just an excuse for finger-pointing where nobody is held to account for anything.

But companies elsewhere should certainly not be looking for a weakening of their accountability structures so as to maintain a similarly convenient situation of corporate hypocrisy: if Sony BMG does something unethical, Sony Imaging should take the bad with the good when they share and exploit the Sony brand; people cannot have things both ways. And Chinese companies should comply with international governance principles, if only to reassure their investors that nasty surprises (and liabilities) do not lie in wait because parts of such businesses were poorly supervised and not held accountable for any unethical activities taking place.

It is up to everyone to make their own decision about this. The policy of the campaign is that the A20 can be supported by Free Software without needing any proprietary software, does not rely on any Allwinner-engineered, licence-violating software (which might be perceived as a good thing), and is merely the first step into a wider endeavour that could be conveniently undertaken with the limited resources available at the time. Later computer cards may ignore Allwinner entirely, especially if the company does not clean up its act, but such cards may never get made if the campaign fails and the wider endeavour never even begins in earnest.

(And I sincerely hope that those who are apparently so outraged by GPL violations actually support organisations seeking to educate and correct companies who commit such violations.)

“You could buy a top-end laptop for that price!”

Sure you could. But this isn’t about a crowd-funding campaign trying to magically compete with an optimised production process that turns out millions of units every year backed by a multi-billion-dollar corporation. It is about highlighting the possibilities of more scalable (down to the economically-viable manufacture of a single unit), more sustainable device design and construction. And by the way, that laptop you were talking about won’t be upgradeable, so when you tire of its performance or if the battery loses its capacity, I suppose you will be disposing of it (hopefully responsibly) and presumably buying something similarly new and shiny by today’s measures.

Meanwhile, with EOMA68, the computing part of the supposedly overpriced laptop will be upgradeable, and with sensible device design the battery (and maybe other things) will be replaceable, too. Over time, EOMA68 solutions should be competitive on price, anyway, because larger numbers of them will be produced, but unlike traditional products, the increased usable lifespans of EOMA68 solutions will also offer longer-term savings to their purchasers, too.

“You could just buy a used laptop instead!”

Sure you could. At some point you will need to be buying a very old laptop just to have a CPU without a surveillance engine and offering some level of upgrade potential, although the specification might be disappointing to you. Even worse, things don’t last forever, particularly batteries and certain kinds of electronic components. Replacing those things may well be a challenge, and although it is worthwhile to make sure things get reused rather than immediately discarded, you can’t rely on picking up a particular product in the second-hand market forever. And relying on sourcing second-hand items is very much for limited edition products, whereas the EOMA68 initiative is meant to be concerned with reliably producing widely-available products.

“Why pay more for ideological purity?”

Firstly, words like “ideology”, “religion”, “church”, and so on, might be useful terms for trolls to poison and polarise any discussion, but does anyone not see that expecting suspiciously cheap, increasingly capable products to be delivered in an almost conveyor belt fashion is itself subscribing to an ideology? One that mandates that resources should be procured at the minimum cost and processed and assembled at the minimum cost, preferably without knowing too much about the human rights abuses at each step. Where everybody involved is threatened that at any time their role may be taken over by someone offering the same thing for less. And where a culture of exploitation towards those doing the work grows, perpetuating increasing wealth inequality because those offering the services in question will just lean harder on the workers to meet their cost target (while they skim off “their share” for having facilitated the deal). Meanwhile, no-one buying the product wants to know “how the sausage is made”. That sounds like an ideology to me: one of neoliberalism combined with feigned ignorance of the damage it does.

Anyway, people pay for more sustainable, more ethical products all the time. While the wilfully ignorant may jeer that they could just buy what they regard as the same thing for less (usually being unaware of factors like quality, never mind how these things get made), more sensible people see that the extra they pay provides the basis for a fairer, better society and higher-quality goods.

“There’s no point to such modularity!”

People argue this alongside the assertion that systems are easy to upgrade and that they can independently upgrade the RAM and CPU in their desktop tower system or whatever, although they usually start off by talking about laptops, but clearly not the kind of “welded shut” laptops that they or maybe others would apparently prefer to buy (see above). But systems are getting harder to upgrade, particularly portable systems like laptops, tablets, smartphones (with Fairphone 2 being a rare exception of being something that might be upgradeable), and even upgradeable systems are not typically upgraded by most end-users: they may only manage to do so by enlisting the help of more knowledgeable relatives and friends.

I use a 32-bit system that is over 11 years old. It could have more RAM, and I could do the job of upgrading it, but guess how much I would be upgrading it to: 2GB, which is as much as is supported by the two prototyped 32-bit architecture EOMA68 computer card designs (A20 and jz4775). Only certain 32-bit systems actually support more RAM, mostly because it requires the use of relatively exotic architectural features that a lot of software doesn’t support. As for the CPU, there is no sensible upgrade path even if I were sure that I could remove the CPU without causing damage to it or the board. Now, 64-bit systems might offer more options, and in upgradeable desktop systems more RAM might be added, but it still relies on what the chipset was designed to support. Some chipsets may limit upgrades based on either manufacturer pessimism (no-one will be able to afford larger amounts in the near future) or manufacturer cynicism (no-one will upgrade to our next product if they can keep adding more RAM).

EOMA68 makes a trade-off in order to support the upgrading of devices in a way that should be accessible to people who are not experts: no-one should be dealing with circuit boards and memory modules. People who think hardware engineering has nothing to do with compromises should get out of their armchair, join one of the big corporations already doing hardware, and show them how it is done, because I am sure those companies would appreciate such market-dominating insight.

An EOMA68 computer card with the micro-desktop device (courtesy Rhombus Tech/Crowd Supply)

Back to the Campaign

But really, the criticisms are not the things to focus on here. Maybe EOMA68 was interesting to you and then you read one of these criticisms somewhere and started to wonder about whether it is a good idea to support the initiative after all. Now, at least you have another perspective on them, albeit from someone who actually believes that EOMA68 provides an interesting and credible way forward for sustainable technology products.

Certainly, this campaign is not for everyone. Above all else it is crowd-funding: you are pledging for rewards, not buying things, even though the aim is to actually manufacture and ship real products to those who have pledged for them. Some crowd-funding exercises never deliver anything because they underestimate the difficulties of doing so, leaving a horde of angry backers with nothing to show for their money. I cannot make any guarantees here, but given that prototypes have been made over the last few years, that videos have been produced with a charming informality that would surely leave no-one seriously believing that “the whole thing was just rendered” (which tends to happen a lot with other campaigns), and given the initiative founder’s stubbornness not to give up, I have a lot of confidence in him to make good on his plans.

(A lot of campaigns underestimate the logistics and, having managed to deliver a complicated technological product, fail to manage the apparently simple matter of “postage”, infuriating their backers by being unable to get packages sent to all the different countries involved. My impression is that logistics expertise is what Crowd Supply brings to the table, and it really surprises me that established freight and logistics companies aren’t dipping their toes in the crowd-funding market themselves, either by running their own services or taking ownership stakes and integrating their services into such businesses.)

Personally, I think that $65 for a computer card that actually has more RAM than most single-board computers is actually a reasonable price, but I can understand that some of the other rewards seem a bit more expensive than one might have hoped. But these are effectively “limited edition” prices, and the aim of the exercise is not to merely make some things, get them for the clique of backers, and then never do anything like this ever again. Rather, the aim is to demonstrate that such products can be delivered, develop a market for them where the quantities involved will be greater, and thus be able to increase the competitiveness of the pricing, iterating on this hopefully successful formula. People are backing a standard and a concept, with the benefit of actually getting some hardware in return.

Interestingly, one priority of the campaign has been to seek the FSF’s “Respects Your Freedom” (RYF) endorsement. There is already plenty of hardware that employs proprietary software at some level, leaving the user to merely wonder what some “binary blob” actually does. Here, with one of the software distributions for the computer card, all of the software used on the card and the policies of the GNU/Linux distribution concerned – a surprisingly awkward obstacle – will seek to meet the FSF’s criteria. Thus, the “Libre Tea” card will hopefully be one of the first general purpose computing solutions to actually be designed for RYF certification and to obtain it, too.

The campaign runs until August 26th and has over a thousand pledges. If nothing else, go and take a look at the details and the updates, with the latter providing lots of background including video evidence of how the software offerings have evolved over the course of the campaign. And even if it’s not for you, maybe people you know might appreciate hearing about it, even if only to follow the action and to see how crowd-funding campaigns are done.

I had the opportunity over the holidays to browse the January 2015 issue of “Which?” – the magazine of the Consumers’ Association in Britain – which, amongst other things, covered the topic of “technology ecosystems“. Which? has a somewhat patchy record when technology matters are taken into consideration: on the one hand, reviews consider the practical and often mundane aspects of gadgets such as battery life, screen brightness, and so on, continuing their tradition of giving all sorts of items a once over; on the other hand, issues such as platform choice and interoperability are typically neglected.

Which? is very much pitched at the “empowered consumer” – someone who is looking for a “good deal” and reassurances about an impending purchase – and so the overriding attitude is one that is often in evidence in consumer societies like Britain: what’s in it for me? In other words, what goodies will the sellers give me to persuade me to choose them over their competitors? (And aren’t I lucky that these nice companies are throwing offers at me, trying to win my custom?) A treatment of ecosystems should therefore be somewhat interesting reading because through the mere use of the term “ecosystem” it acknowledges that alongside the usual incentives and benefits that the readership is so keen to hear about, there are choices and commitments to be made, with potentially negative consequences if one settles in the wrong ecosystem. (Especially if others are hell-bent on destroying competing ecosystems in a “war” as former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop – now back at Microsoft, having engineered the sale of a large chunk of Nokia to, of course, Microsoft – famously threatened in another poor choice of imagery as part of what must be the one of the most insensitively-formulated corporate messages of recent years.)

Perhaps due to the formula behind such articles in Which? and similar arenas, some space is used to describe the benefits of committing to an ecosystem.  Above the “expert view” describing the hassles of switching from a Windows phone to an Android one, the title tells us that “convenience counts for a lot”. But the article does cover problems with the availability of applications and services depending on the platform chosen, and even the matter of having to repeatedly buy access to content comes up, albeit with a disappointing lack of indignance for a topic that surely challenges basic consumer rights. The conclusion is that consumers should try and keep their options open when choosing which services to use. Sensible and uncontroversial enough, really.

The Consequences of Apathy

But sadly, Which? is once again caught in a position of reacting to technology industry change and the resulting symptoms of a deeper malaise. When reviewing computers over the years, the magazine (and presumably its sister publications) always treated the matter of platform choice with a focus on “PCs and Macs” exclusively, with the latter apparently being “the alternative” (presumably in a feeble attempt to demonstrate a coverage of choice that happens to exist in only two flavours). The editors would most likely protest that they can only cover the options most widely available to buy in a big-name store and that any lack of availability of a particular solution – say, GNU/Linux or one of the freely available BSDs – is the consequence of a lack of consumer interest, and thus their readership would also be uninterested.

Such an unwillingness to entertain genuine alternatives, and to act in the interests of members of their audience who might be best served by those solutions, demonstrates that Which? is less of a leader in consumer matters than its writers might have us believe. Refusing to acknowledge that Which? can and does drive demand for alternatives, only to then whine about the bundled products of supposed consumer interest, demonstrates a form of self-imposed impotence when faced with the coercion of proprietary product upgrade schedules. Not everyone – even amongst the Which? readership – welcomes the impending vulnerability of their computing environment as another excuse to go shopping for shiny new toys, nor should they be thankful that Which? has done little or nothing to prevent the situation from occurring in the first place.

Thus, Which? has done as much as the rest of the mainstream technology press to unquestioningly sustain the monopolistic practices of the anticompetitive corporate repeat offender, Microsoft, with only a cursory acknowledgement of other platforms in recent years, qualified by remarks that Free Software alternatives such as GNU/Linux and LibreOffice are difficult to get started with or not what people are used to. After years of ignoring such products and keeping them marginalised, this would be the equivalent of denying someone the chance to work and then criticising them for not having a long list of previous employers to vouch for them on their CV.  Noting that 1.1-billion people supposedly use Microsoft Office (“one in seven people on the planet”) makes for a nice statistic in the sidebar of the print version of the article, but how many people have a choice in doing so or, for that matter, in using other Microsoft products bundled with computers (or foisted on office workers or students due to restrictive or corrupt workplace or institutional policies)? Which? has never been concerned with such topics, or indeed the central matter of anticompetitive software bundling, or its role in the continuation of such practices in the marketplace: strange indeed for a consumer advocacy publication.

At last, obliged to review a selection of fundamentally different ecosystem choices – as opposed to pretending that different vendor badges on anonymous laptops provide genuine choice – Which? has had to confront the practical problems brought about by an absence of interoperability: that consumers might end up stranded with a large, non-transferable investment in something they no longer wish to be a part of. Now, the involvement of a more diverse selection of powerful corporate interests have made such matters impossible to ignore. One gets the impression that for now at least, the publication cannot wish such things away and return to the lazy days of recommending that everyone line up and pay a single corporation their dues, refusing to believe that there could be anything else out there, let alone usable Free Software platforms.

Beyond Treating the Symptoms

Elsewhere in the January issue, the latest e-mail scam is revealed. Of course, a campaign to widen the adoption of digitally-signed mail would be a start, but that is probably too much to expect from Which?: just as space is dedicated to mobile security “apps” in this issue, countless assortments of antivirus programs have been peddled and reviewed in the past, but solving problems effectively requires a leader rather than a follower. Which? may do the tedious job of testing kettles, toasters, washing-up liquids, and much more to a level of thoroughness that would exhaust most people’s patience and interest. And to the publication’s credit, a certain degree of sensible advice is offered on topics such as online safety, albeit with the usual emphasis on proprietary software for the copy of Windows that members of its readership were all forced to accept. But in technology, Which? appears to be a mere follower, suggesting workarounds rather than working to build a fair market for safe, secure and interoperable products.

It is surely time for Which? to join the dots and to join other organisations in campaigning for fundamental change in the way technology is delivered by vendors and used throughout society. Then, by upholding a fair marketplace, interoperability, access to digital signature and encryption technologies, true ownership of devices and of purchased content, and all the things already familiar to Free Software and online rights advocates, they might be doing their readership a favour after all.

Hugo complains about Dell playing around with hardware specifications on their Ubuntu-based laptop products. (Hugo has been raising some pretty interesting issues, lately!)

I think that one reason why Dell was dropped from the Hardware Vendors page on the FSFE Fellowship Wiki was that even though Dell was promoting products with GNU/Linux pre-installed, actually finding them remained a challenge involving navigating through page after page of “Dell recommends Windows Vista/Windows 8/Windows Whatever” before either finding a low-specification and overpriced afterthought of a product or the customer just giving up on the whole idea.

Every time they “embrace Linux” I’d like to think that Dell are serious – indeed, Dell manages to support enterprise distributions of GNU/Linux on servers and workstations, so they can be serious, making their antics somewhat suspiciously incompetent at the “home and small office” level – but certainly, the issue of the changing chipset is endemic: I’m pretty sure that a laptop I had to deal with recently didn’t have the advertised chipset, and I tried as hard as possible to select the exact model variant, knowing that vendors switch things out “on the quiet” even for the same model. On that occasion, it was Lenovo playing around.

The first thing any major vendor should do to be taken seriously is to guarantee that if they sell a model with a specific model number then it has a precise and unchanging specification and that both the proper model number and the specification are publicly advertised. Only then can we rely on and verify claims of compatibility with our favourite Free Software operating systems.

Until then, I can only recommend buying a system from a retailer who will stand by their product and attempt to ensure that it will function correctly with the Free Software of your choice, not only initially but also throughout a decent guarantee period. Please help us maintain the Hardware Vendors page and to support vendors and retailers who support Free Software themselves.

(Note to potential buyers and vendors: the Hardware Vendors page does not constitute any recommendation or endorsement of products or services, nor does the absence of any vendor imply disapproval of that vendor’s products. The purpose of the page is to offer information about available products and services based on the experiences and research of wiki contributors, and as such is not a marketplace or a directory where vendors may request or demand to be represented. Indeed, the best way for a vendor to be mentioned on that page is to coherently and consistently offer products that work with Free Software and that satisfy customer needs so that someone may feel happy enough with their purchase that they want to tell other people about it. Yes, that’s good old-fashioned service being recognised and rewarded: an unusual concept in the modern world of business, I’m sure.)

The inside of some random Dell computer at a former workplace - this one may not have been running GNU/Linux, but my Dell workstation was

It is a recurring but tiresome joke: is this the year of the Linux desktop? In fact, the year I started using GNU/Linux on the desktop was 1995 when my university department installed the operating system as a boot option alongside Windows 3.1 on the machines in the “PC laboratory”, presumably starting the migration of Unix functionality away from expensive workstations supplied by Sun, DEC, HP and SGI and towards commodity hardware based on the Intel x86 architecture and supplied by companies who may not be around today either (albeit for reasons of competing with each other on razor-thin margins until the slightest downturn made their businesses non-viable). But on my own hardware, my own year of the Linux desktop was 1999 when I wiped Windows NT 4 from the laptop made available for my use at work (and subsequently acquired for my use at home) and installed Red Hat Linux 6.0 over an ISDN link, later installing Red Hat Linux 6.1 from the media included in the official boxed product bought at a local bookstore.

Back then, some people had noticed that GNU/Linux was offering a lot better reliability than the Windows range of products, and people using X11 had traditionally been happy enough (or perhaps knew not to ask for more) with a window manager, perhaps some helper utilities to launch applications, and some pop-up menus to offer shortcuts for common tasks. It wasn’t as if the territory beyond the likes of fvwm had not already been explored in the Unix scene: the first Unix workstations I used in 1992 had a product called X.desktop which sought to offer basic desktop functionality and file management, and other workstations offered such products as CDE or elements of Sun’s Open Look portfolio. But people could see the need for something rather more than just application launchers and file managers. At the very least, desktops also needed applications to be useful and those applications needed to look, act like, and work with the rest of the desktop to be credible. And the underlying technology needed to be freely available and usable so that anyone could get involved and so that the result could be distributed with all the other software in a GNU/Linux distribution.

It was this insight – that by giving that audience the tools and graphical experience that they needed or were accustomed to, the audience for Free Software would be broadened – that resulted first in KDE and then in GNOME; the latter being a reaction to the lack of openness of some of the software provided in the former as well as to certain aspects of the technologies involved (because not all C programmers want to be confronted with C++). I remember a conversation around the year 2000 with a systems administrator at a small company that happened to be a customer of my employer, where the topic somehow shifted to the adoption of GNU/Linux – maybe I noticed that the administrator was using KDE or maybe someone said something about how I had installed Red Hat – and the administrator noted how KDE, even at version 1.0, was at that time good enough and close enough to what people were already using for it to be rolled out to the company’s desktops. KDE 1.0 wasn’t necessarily the nicest environment in every regard – I switched to GNOME just to have a nicer terminal application and a more flexible panel – but one could see how it delivered a complete experience on a common technological platform rather than just bundling some programs and throwing them onto the screen when commanded via some apparently hastily-assembled gadget.

Of course, it is easy to become nostalgic and to forget the shortcomings of the Free Software desktop in the year 2000. Back then, despite the initial efforts in the KDE project to support HTML rendering that would ultimately produce Konqueror and lead to the WebKit family of browsers, the most credible Web browsing solution available to most people was, if one wishes to maintain nostalgia for a moment, the legendary Netscape Communicator. Indeed, despite its limitations, this application did much to keep the different desktop environments viable in certain kinds of workplaces, where as long as people could still access the Web and read their mail, and not cause problems for any administrators, people could pretty much get away with using whatever they wanted. However, the technological foundations for Netscape Communicator were crumbling by the month, and it became increasingly unsupported and unmaintained. Relying on a mostly proprietary stack of software as well as being proprietary itself, it was unmaintainable by any community.

Fortunately, the Free Software communities produced Web browsers that were, and are, not merely viable but also at the leading edge of their field in many ways. One might not choose to regard the years of Netscape Communicator’s demise as those of crisis, but we have much to be thankful for in this respect, not least that the Mozilla browser (in the form of SeaMonkey and Firefox) became a stable and usable product that did not demand too much of the hardware available to run it. And although there has never been a shortage of e-mail clients, it can be considered fortunate that projects such as KMail, Kontact and Evolution were established and have been able to provide years of solid service.

You Are Here

With such substantial investment made in the foundations of the Free Software desktop, and with its viability established many years ago (at least for certain groups of users), we might well expect to be celebrating now, fifteen years or so after people first started to see the need for such an endeavour, reaping the rewards of that investment and demonstrating a solution that is innovative and yet stable, usable and yet reliable: a safe choice that has few shortcomings and that offers more opportunities than the proprietary alternatives. It should therefore come as a shock that the position of the Free Software desktop has not been as troubled as it is now for quite some time.

As time passed by, KDE 1 was followed by KDE 2 and then KDE 3. I still use KDE 3, clinging onto the functionality while it still runs on a distribution that is still just about supported. When KDE 2 came out, I switched back from GNOME because the KDE project had a more coherent experience on offer than bundling Mozilla and Evolution with what we would now call the GNOME “shell”, and for a long time I used Konqueror as my main Web browser. Although things didn’t always work properly in KDE 3, and there are things that will never be fixed and polished, it perhaps remains the pinnacle of the project’s achievements.

On KDE 3, the panel responsible for organising and launching applications, showing running applications and the status of various things, just works; I may have spent some time moving icons around a few years ago, but it starts up and everything uses the right amount of space. The “K” (or “start”) menu is just a menu, leaving itself open to the organisational whims of the distribution, but on my near-obsolete Kubuntu version there’s not much in the way of bizarre menu entry and application duplication. Kontact lets me read mail and apply spam filters that are still effective, filter and organise my mail into folders; it shows HTML mail only when I ask it to, and it shows inline images only when I tell it to, which are both things that I have seen Thunderbird struggle with (amongst certain other things). Konqueror may not be a viable default for Web browsing any more, but it does a reasonable job for files on both local disks and remote systems via WebDAV and ssh, the former being seemingly impossible with Nautilus against the widely-deployed Free Software Web server that serves my files. Digikam lets me download, view and tag my pictures, occasionally also being used to fix the metadata; it only occasionally refuses to access my camera, mostly because the underlying mechanisms seem to take an unhealthy interest in how many files there are in the camera’s memory; Amarok plays my music from my local playlists, which is all I ask of it.

So when my distribution finally loses its support, or when I need to recommend a desktop environment to others, even though KDE 3 has served me very well, I cannot really recommend it because it has for the most part been abandoned. An attempt to continue development and maintenance does exist in the form of the Trinity Desktop Environment project, but the immensity of the task combined with the dissipation of the momentum behind KDE 3, and the effective discontinuation of the Qt 3 libraries that underpin the original software, means that its very viability must be questioned as its maintainers are stretched in every direction possible.

Why Can’t We All Get Along?

In an attempt to replicate what I would argue is the very successful environment that I enjoy, I tried to get Trinity working on a recent version of Ubuntu. The encouraging thing is that it managed to work, more or less, although there were some disturbing signs of instability: things would crash but then work when tried once more; the user administration panel wasn’t usable because it couldn’t find a shared library for the Python runtime environment that did, in fact, exist on the system. The “K” menu seemed to suffer from KDE 4 (or, rather, KDE Plasma Desktop) also being available on the same system because lots of duplicate menu entries were present. This may be an unfortunate coincidence, Trinity being overly helpful, or it may be a consequence of KDE 4 occupying the same configuration “namespace”. I sincerely hope that it is not the latter: any project that breaks compatibility and continuity in the fashion that KDE has done should not monopolise or corrupt a resource that actually contains the data of the user.

There probably isn’t any fundamental reason why Trinity could not return KDE 3 to some level of its former glory as a contemporary desktop environment, but getting there could certainly be made easier if everyone worked together a bit more. Having been obliged to do some user management tasks in another environment before returning to my exploration of Trinity, I attempted to set up a printer. Here, with the printer plugged in and me perusing the list of supported printers, there appeared to be no way of getting the system to recognise a three- or four-year-old printer that was just too recent for the list provided by Trinity. Returning to the other environment and trying there, a newer list was somehow obtained and the printer selected, although the exercise was still highly frustrating and didn’t really provide support for the exact model concerned.

But both environments presumably use the same print system, so why should one be better supplied than the other for printer definitions? Surely this is common infrastructure stuff that doesn’t specifically relate to any desktop environment or user interface. Is it easier to make such functionality for one environment than another, or just too convenient to take a short-cut and hack something up that covers the needs of one environment, or is it too much work to make a generic component to do the job and to package it correctly and to test it in more than a narrow configuration? Do the developers get worried about performance and start to consider complicated services that might propagate printer configuration details around the system in a high-performance manner before their manager or supervisor tells them to scale back their ambition?

I remember having to configure network printers in the previous century on Solaris using special script files. I am also sure that doing things at the lowest levels now would probably be just as frustrating, especially since the pain of Solaris would be replaced by the need to deal with things other than firing plain PostScript across the network, but there seems to be a wide gulf between this and the point-and-click tools between which some level of stability could exist and make sure that no matter how old and nostalgic a desktop environment may be perceived to be, at least it doesn’t need to dedicate effort towards tedious housekeeping or duplicating code that everyone needs and would otherwise need to write for themselves.

The Producers (and the Consumers)

One might be inclined to think that my complaints are largely formed through a bitter acceptance that things just don’t stay the same, although one can always turn this around and question why functioning software cannot go on functioning forever. Indeed, there is plenty of software on the planet that now goes about its business virtualised and still with the belief, if the operating assumptions of software can be considered in such a way, that it runs on the same range of hardware that it was written for, that hardware having been introduced (and even retired) decades ago. But for software that has to be run in a changing environment, handling new ways of doing things as well as repelling previously unimagined threats to its correct functioning and reliability, needing a community of people who are willing to maintain and develop the software further, one has to accept that there are practical obstacles to the sustained use of that software in the environments for which it was intended.

Particularly the matter of who is going to do all the hard work, and what incentives might exist to persuade them to do it if not for personal satisfaction or curiosity, is of crucial importance. This is where conflicts and misunderstandings emerge. If the informal contract between the users and developers were taking place with no historical context whatsoever, with each side having expectations of the other, one might be more inclined to sympathise with the complaints of developers that they do all the hard work and yet the users merely complain. Yet in practice, the interactions take place in the context of the users having invested in the software, too. Certainly, even if the experience has not been one of complete, uninterrupted enjoyment, the users may not have invested as much energy as the developers, but they will have played their own role in the success of the endeavour. Any radical change to the contract involves writing off the users’ investment as well as that of the developers, and without the users providing incentives and being able to direct the work, they become exposed to unpredictable risk.

One fair response to the supposed disempowerment of the user is that the user should indeed “pay their way”. I see no conflict between this and the sustainable development of Free Software at all. If people want things done, one way that society has thoroughly established throughout the ages is that people pay for it. This shouldn’t stop people freely sharing software (or not, if they so choose), because people should ultimately realise that for something to continue on a sustainable basis, they or some part of society has to provide for the people continuing that effort. But do desktop developers want the user to pay up and have a say in the direction of the product? There is something liberating about not taking money directly from your customers and being able to treat the exercise almost like art, telling the audience that they don’t have to watch the performance if they don’t like it.

This is where we encounter the matter of reputation: the oldest desktop environments have been established for long enough that they are widely accepted by distributions, even though the KDE project that produces KDE 4 has quite a different composition and delivers substantially different code from the KDE project that produced KDE 3. By keeping the KDE brand around, the project of today is able to trade on its long-standing reputation, reassure distributions that the necessary volunteers will be able to keep up with packaging obligations, and indeed attract such volunteers through widespread familiarity with the brand. That is the good side of having a recognised brand; the bad side is that people’s expectations are higher and that they expect the quality and continuity that the brand has always offered them.

What’s Wrong with Change?

In principle, nothing is essentially wrong with change. Change can complement the ways that things have always been done, and people can embrace new ways and come to realise that the old ways were just inferior. So what has changed on the Free Software desktop and how does it complement and improve on those trusted old ways of doing things?

It can be argued that KDE and GNOME started out with environments like CDE and Windows 95 acting as their inspiration at some level. As GNOME began to drift towards resembling the “classic” Mac OS environment in the GNOME 2 release series, having a menu bar at the top of the screen through which applications and system settings could be accessed, together with the current time and other status details, projects like XFCE gained momentum by appealing to the audience for whom the simple but configurable CDE paradigm was familiar and adequate. And now that Unity has reintroduced the Mac-style top menu bar as the place where application menus appear – a somewhat archaic interface even in the late 1980s – we can expect more users to discover other projects. In effect, the celebrated characteristics of the community around Free Software have let people go their own way in the company of developers who they felt shared the same vision or at least understood their needs best.

That people can indeed change their desktop environment and choose to run different software is a strength of Free Software and the platforms built on it, but the need for people to have to change – that those running GNOME, for example, feel that their needs are no longer being met and must therefore evaluate alternatives like XFCE – is a weakness brought about by projects that will happily enjoy the popularity delivered by the reputation of their “brand”, and who will happily enjoy having an audience delivered by previous versions of that software, but who then feel that they can change the nature of their product in ways that no longer meet that audience’s needs while pretending to be delivering the same product. If a user can no longer do something in a new release of a product, that should be acknowledged as a failing in that product. The user should not be compelled to find another product to use and be told that since a choice of software exists, he or she should be prepared to exercise that choice at the first opportunity. Such disregard for the user’s own investment in the software that has now abandoned him or her, not to mention the waste of the user’s time and energy in having to install alternative software just to be able to keep doing the same things, is just unacceptable.

“They are the 90%”

Sometimes attempts at justifying or excusing change are made by referring to the potential audience reached by a significantly modified product. Having a satisfied group of users numbering in the thousands is not always as exciting as one that numbers in the millions, and developers can be jealous of the success of others in reaching such numbers. One still sees labels like “10x” or “x10” being used and notions of ten-fold increases in audiences as being a necessary strategy phrased in a new and innovative way, mostly by people who perhaps missed such terminology and the accompanying strategic doctrine the first time round (or second, or third time) many years ago, and such order-of-magnitude increases are often dictated by the assumption that the 90% not currently in the audience for a product would find the product too complicated or too technologically focused and that the product must therefore discard features, or change the way it exposes its features, in order to appeal to that 90%.

Unfortunately, such initiatives to reach larger audiences risk alienating the group of users that are best understood in order to reach groups of users that are largely under-researched and thus barely understood at all. (The 90% is not a single monolithic block of identically-minded people, of course, so there is more than one group of users.) Now, one tempting way of avoiding the need to understand the untapped mass of potential users is to imitate those who are successfully reaching those users already or who at least aspire to do so. Thus, KDE 4 and Windows Vista had a certain similarity, presumably because various visual characteristics of Vista, such as its usage of desktop gadgets, were perceived to be useful features applicable to the wider marketplace and thus “must have” features that provide a way to appeal to people who don’t already use KDE or Windows. (Having a tiny picture frame on the desktop background might be a nice way of replicating the classic picture of one’s closest family on one’s physical desktop, but I doubt that it makes or breaks the adoption of a technology. Many people are still using their computer at a desk or at home where they still have those pictures in plain view; most people aren’t working from the beach where they desperately need them as a thumbnail carousel obscured by their application windows.)

However, it should be remembered that the products being imitated may also originate from organisations who also do not really understand their potential audience, either. Windows Vista was perceived to be a decisive response by Microsoft to the threat of alternative platforms but was regarded as a flop despite being forced on computer purchasers. And even if new users adopt such products, it doesn’t mean that they welcome or unconditionally approve of the supposed innovations introduced in their name, especially if Microsoft and its business partners forced those users to adopt such products when buying their current machine.

The Linux Palmtop and the Linux Desktop

With the success of Android – or more accurately, Android/Linux – claims may be made that radical departures from the traditional desktop software stacks and paradigms are clearly the necessary ingredient for success for GNU/Linux on the desktop, and it might be said that if only people had realised this earlier, the Free Software desktop would have become dominant. Moreover, it might also be argued that “desktop thinking” held back adoption of Linux on mobile devices, too, opening the door for a single vendor to define the payload that delivered Linux to the mobile-device-consuming masses. Certainly, the perceived need for a desktop on a mobile or PDA (personal digital assistant) is entrenched: go back a few years and the GNOME Palmtop Environment (GPE) was seen as the counterweight to Windows CE on something like a Compaq iPAQ. Even on the Golden Delicious GTA04 device, LXDE – a lightweight desktop environment – has been the default environment, admittedly more for verification purposes than for practical use as a telephone.

Naturally, a desktop environment is fairly impractical on a small screen with limited navigational controls. Although early desktop systems had fewer pixels than today’s smartphones, the increased screen size provided much greater navigational control and matched the desktop paradigm much better. It is interesting to note that the Xerox Star had a monochrome 1024×809 display, which is perhaps still larger than many smartphones, that (according to the Wikipedia entry) “…was meant to be able to display two 8.5×11 in pages side by side in actual size”. Even when we become able to show the equivalent amount of content on a smartphone screen at a resolution sufficient to permit its practical use, perhaps with very good eyesight or some additional assistance through magnification, it will remain a challenge to navigate that information precisely. Selecting text, for instance, will not be possible without a very precise pointing instrument.

Of course, one way of handling such challenges that is already prevalent is that of being able to zoom in and out of the content, with the focus in recent years on being able to do so through gestures, although the ability to zoom in on documents at arbitrary levels has been around for many years in the computer-aided design, illustration and desktop publishing fields amongst others, and the notion of general user interfaces permitting fluid scrolling and zooming over a surface showing content was already prominent before smartphones adopted and popularised it further. On the one hand, new and different “form factors” – kinds of device with different characteristics – offer improved methods of navigation, perhaps being more natural than the traditional mouse and keyboard attached to a desktop computer, but those methods may not lend themselves to use on a desktop computer with its proven ergonomics of sitting at a comfortable distance from a generously proportioned display and being able to enter textual input using a dedicated device with an efficiency that is difficult to match using, say, a virtual keyboard on a touchscreen.

Proclamations may occasionally be made that work at desks in offices will become obsolete in favour of the mobile workplace, but as that mobile workplace is apparently so often situated at the café table, the aircraft tray table, or once the lap or forearm is tired of supporting a device, some other horizontal surface, the desktop paradigm with its supporting cast of input devices and sophisticated applications will still be around in some form and cannot be convincingly phased out in favour of content consumption paradigms that refuse to tackle the most demanding of the desktop functionality we enjoy today.

The Real Obstacle

Up to this point, my pontification has limited itself to considering what has made the “Linux desktop” attractive in the past, what makes it attractive or unattractive today, and whether the directions currently being taken might make it more attractive to new audiences and to existing users, or instead fail to capture the interest of new audiences whilst alienating existing users. In an ideal world, with every option given equal attention, and with every individual able to exercise a completely free choice and adopt the product or solution that meets his or her own needs best, we could focus on the above topic and not have to worry about anything else. Unfortunately, we do not live in such an ideal world.

Most hardware sold in retail outlets visited by the majority of potential and current computer users is bundled with proprietary software in the form of Microsoft Windows. Indeed, in these outlets, accounting for the bulk of retail sales of computers to private customers, it is not possible to refuse the bundled software and to choose to buy only the hardware so that an alternative software system may be used with the computer instead (or at least not without needing to pursue vendors afterwards, possibly via legal avenues). In such an anticompetitive environment, many customers associate the bundled software with computer hardware in general and remain unaware of alternatives, leaving the struggle to educate those customers to motivated individuals, organisations like the FSF (and FSFE), and to independent retailers.

Unfortunately, individuals and organisations have to spend their own time and money (or their volunteers’ time and their donors’ money) righting the wrongs of the industry. Independent retailers offer hardware without bundled software, or offer Free Software pre-installed as a convenience but without cost, but the low margins on such “bare” or Free Software systems mean that they too are fixing the injustices of the system at their own expense. Once again, our considerations need to be broadened so as to not merely consider the merits of Free Software delivered as a desktop environment for the end-user, but also to the challenge of getting that software in front of the end-user in the first place. And further still: although we might (and should) consider encouraging regulatory bodies to investigate the dubious practices of product bundling, we also need to consider how we might support those who attempt to reach out and educate end-users without waiting for the regulators to act.

Putting the Pieces Together

One way we might support those getting Free Software onto hardware and into the hands of end-users – in this case, purchasers of new computer hardware – is to help them, the independent retailers, command a better price for their products. If all other things are equal, people generally will not pay more for something that they can get cheaper elsewhere. If they can be persuaded to believe that a product is better in certain ways, then paying a little more doesn’t seem so bad, and the extra cost can often be justified. Sadly, convincing people about the merits of Free Software can be a time-consuming process, and people may not see the significance of those merits straight away, and so other merits are also required to help build up a sustainable margin that can be fed into the Free Software ecosystem.

Some organisations advocate that bundling services is an acceptable way of appealing to end-users and making a bit of money that can fund Free Software development. However, such an approach risks bringing with it all that is undesirable about the illegitimately-bundled software that customers are obliged to accept on their new computer: advertising, compromised user experiences, and the feeling that they are not in control of their purchase. Moreover, seeking revenue from service providers or selling proprietary services to existing end-users fails to seriously tackle the market access issue that impacts Free Software the most.

A better and proven way of providing additional persuasion is, of course, to make a better product, which is why it is crucial to understand whether the different communities developing the “Linux desktop” are succeeding in doing so or not. If not, we need to understand what we need to do to help people offer viable products that people will buy and use, because the alternative is to continue our under-resourced campaign of only partly successful persuasion and education. And this may put our other activities at risk, too, affording us only desperate resistance to all the nasty anticompetitive measures, both political and technical, that well-resourced and industry-dominating corporations are able to initiate with relative ease.

In short, our activities need to fit together and to support each other so that the whole endeavour may be sustainable and be able to withstand the threats levelled against it and against us. We need to deliver a software experience that people will use and continue to use, we need to recognise that those who get that software in front of end-users need our support in running a viable business doing so (far more than large vendors who only court the Free Software communities when it suits them), and we need to acknowledge the threats to our communities and to be prepared to fight those threats or to support those who do so.

Once we have shown that we can work together and act on all of these simultaneously and continuously as a community, maybe then it will become clear that the year of the Linux desktop has at last arrived for good.

Have you ever wanted to buy a computer without paying a certain corporation for a product of theirs that you don’t want? Were you concerned that, regardless of whether you managed to buy a system without that unwanted operating system, the hardware might not support your favourite operating system distribution properly, leaving you unable to use some of the computer’s hardware (like the wireless network or some of the fancy graphical capabilities)? Were you worried that you might need to do extra work to support your favourite distribution and that people you know would end up blaming you for persuading them to try out something like GNU/Linux? Did you ever try to buy a “computer that runs Linux” from a major manufacturer only to find yourself navigating a labyrinth on their Web site (with every passage prominently marked with an advertisement for the unwanted proprietary product of a certain corporation), ending up either on a page telling you that they don’t sell that model any more, or on a “404 not found” page with all traces of that model erased from the record as if it never existed in the first place?

On the Fellowship Wiki, we are trying to put together an up-to-date list of vendors selling systems that at the very least don’t involve you paying the “Windows Tax“, and preferably involve the option of having a Free Software operating system distribution (like a GNU/Linux flavour such as Debian, Fedora or Ubuntu) pre-installed and ready to use. Although we don’t endorse any vendors – this is just research into those offering solutions that are friendly to Free Software – we hope that this resource will be useful for anyone looking to buy a new computer and act as an encouragement for other vendors to offer products that uphold healthy competition and appeal to an increasing group of people who care about things like Free Software, privacy, the right to control their own computer, the provenance of the software on their computer, the sustainability of their computing environment, and, of course, the proper functioning of the market for personal computers (where one company should not decide what everyone gets to use).

Go to the Hardware Vendors page to see what we’ve found so far, along with links to other resources that have provided good directions to friendly vendors, and feel free to contribute if you are an FSFE Fellow with some expertise of your own in this area. With the vast majority of ready-to-use computers sold via retail channels bundled with proprietary software, the market has been distorted to make the adoption of Free Software more difficult and to keep end-users ignorant of the benefits of Free Software and their right to control their own computer. Please consider helping us to level the playing field!