Linux has made yet another ‘retail’ appearance; this time at Amazon.com. It has been previously seen at CompUSA, Office Max and Walmart. This boxed version of Ubuntu elicits yet more hope that it may someday be both mainstream and popular. While there are good and abundant technical reasons why this should be so, technical superiority is not one of them.

Else the story would have been about Windows finding a retail vendor, and not the other way around.

I see retail adoption happening by fits and starts. It wasn’t all that long ago that Office Depot carried boxed versions of Red Hat and SuSE on its shelves. If Amazon can make a dime at this, maybe it will hit the office supply and remaining software stores again. But the ‘tipping point’ of Linux adoption, whatever that may be (now at least 8% of all desktops, according to my server logs across several non-technical blogs), has not yet been reached.

How about Egghead? Are they getting in on this? When they killed their retail store, they lost my business. Although I no longer believed what I read on the outside of the box, I still wanted to hold it in my hands. Holding the box means that I can re-install without having to burn my own copy of a downloaded program.

ISTR that both Barnes & Noble and B. Dalton book stores have had boxed Linux available for quite some time. I bought via this channel several times in order to ‘keep the pump primed’.

In Linux, the box becomes less relevant since there is seldom any barrier to re-downloading an application (try to get a second copy of Outlook direct from Microsoft without paying extra for the privelege, folks.). But I have been a Windows user for too many years not to treasure the warm, reasurring feel of a retail box.

Inevitably, someone mentions the absence of ‘first-tier’ games on Linux as being a reason to keep Windows kicking around. I used to use the same reasoning, applied to my cell phone. But now that I am no longer using Windows, my T-Mobile DASH (are you reading this HTC?) is on its own. When it dies (as die it must, since it is running Windows), it will be replaced by a phone / PDA running some version of Linux if I can find one or a PDA with Linux on it and a cheap, prepaid phone. (are YOU reading this, T-Mobile?). I know for a fact that the PDA’s exist.

I paid good money, solid coin of the realm, for my DASH. It’s a thing of beauty. And I’ll do the same for its replacement.

But it’s replacement will sync with Evolution on Linux unless Microsoft has decided to let Outlook and ActiveSync run on Linux. No synch, no sale. Bottom line.

I doubt if games are ever likely to be released as ‘open source’ due to the clearly predictable amount of free copying that is certain to occur. Sorry gamers, but as a group you just haven’t shown yourselves to be all that concerned with fair play. And not paying the programmer is cheating the system that brought you the game.

Want the milk? Feed the cow.

But I’d like to make a suggestion that might change things. Dramatically.

Possibly there could be a certification board set up to assure that closed-source code actually did not contain back-doors, etc. and was thus safe to run on open source systems. It would have to be run under the governance of the open source community, although a corporation could be set up by that community for the purpose. There would have to be some big names on its board to lend credibility and integrity to it.

For an entirely sane fee, commercial vendors could receive certification that GPL copyrights were not violated and that the source code had been inspected for and found free of malware. In other words, that it was “safe” to run.

Then, through some sort of checksum arrangement hosted on the certifying organization servers, each installation of the software could be checked for both uncertified changes and a valid, unused, software key.

While it is understandable that vendors are loathe to release their creations as source code, this would require participating vendors to submit their source code to just one entity. This entity would have resources that could be recovered as liquidated damages in the event of a code leak originating with them. There is also no real reason why there should not be two or more such entities, making separate certifications to reduce the opportunity for collusion. This might also serve to keep prices to vendors in line. It would be a good selling point to point to certification from one, two or even three certifying bodies.

Just a thought.

There needs to be a way to merge commercial software with FOSS software and still address the valid needs of both camps. Until then, FOSS advocates will continue to have to either pay the Microsoft tax or eschew top-end games … and commercial software producers of all sorts will have to miss sales to almost 10% of their potential US and European market and a higher percentage elsewhere.

I’m not a gamer. I don’t miss them. But there are some office applications that, having learned to use them already, I’d be willing to use under Linux, too. PhatNotes on my cell phone is nice. But could easily be replaced by a small flat-file database application in Linux.

Just a note: by running Ubuntu, I am trying to avoid MSFT operating systems. I had another melt-down recently that killed my file system on XP and I just can’t afford that nonsense. I lost data and I lost time. Neither can be replaced.That makes the total cost of using the Microsoft operating system (TCO) too high.

Everyday of my vacation I faithfully downloaded my photographs to my laptop. Before I could get them sorted out and the better ones copied to a CD, they were gone. You can see ONE of them by clicking here and searching on the term “California Lighthouse“.

I am not trying to avoid MSFT-based application programs. Vendors CAN STILL SELL TO ME if, and only if, their program works under either WINE or CrossOver Office.

That’s a clue, guys. Make your stuff run under these emulators on laptops and desktops. And make my data available to native Linux programs running on cell phones & PDA’s.

Don’t make the end-user jump through hoops to use your software and it won’t matter to you which OS they are using because you will still be selling them the applications.

Intuit / Quicken, are you listening? The level of Linux accounting software is advancing pretty rapidly. Because Quickbooks won’t install under Crossover, I can’t use your software. While I am now stuck with a paid-for but unuseable copy of QB2007, I won’t be buying QB2008 (and subsequent releases) at all.