I have been an open source proponent over the past 4 years and realised the frustration over the period of time by sticking on to it. At the centre of debate is the copyright versus copyleft scenario which has no easy solutions and answers. There are proponents of two theories and considerable amount of money and energy is being devoted towards promoting their respective agendas.

Microsoft has been dominating the computer scene for over tow decades now ever since the personal computing came into picture. It is immaterial as to how they achieved their “dominance”. To them, stealing intellectual property rights and passing it off as their own is second nature. They have a whole army of lawyers to battle the companies and frequently tends to settle out of court by paying in huge monies. The owner is the world’s richest man and grows richer by the second. The employees are well paid and I believe that they are taken care off.

On the other hand, there are a group of “hackers” who pit in their brains to make the “free” software work. Their de facto spokesperson which includes the likes of Richard Stallman go around the world propagating free software. Much of the work has been done by these renegade folks who work behind the scenes to create software which is open source which means that anyone can modify their work and release in public.

Much of criticism of Microsoft has been about their stranglehold over the hardware manufacturers. This was evident over the release of Windows Vista which required users to “upgrade” to be able to use a fancy interface which by itself is utterly useless. Still, the company piled on cash to advertise the “features” by trying to induce people to use something that wasn’t really worth it.

Idealism apart, the incremental nature of the hardware complexity has meant that there is a bewildering array of choices in front of a consumer. It becomes difficult to choose and not to fall for the advertising glitz. With the release of new software, the support for the previous versions slowly vanes away. With every version release and “features” the users are forced to upgrade their hardware in order to make the features work.

I faced similar predictament a week back. I have been using Ubuntu on my laptop but howsoever hard I tried, I could not make my webcam or my wireless work. I have been facing issues with my trackpad not working out of the box; it was next to impossible to get the support from the forums or the designated support structures. My usage for the laptop was suboptimal because I could not use the hardware that I had paid my hard earned money to use.

However, I could easily set up the same hardware in Vista which had come previously installed with the same. Wireless worked flawlessly and so did the data transfer. Setting up the network was “easy” and it was a matter of getting used to putting the right buttons to click.

How does this user experience matter? I have been waiting for the “perfect” Linux distribution that would be truly plug and play. No doubt that a lot depends on the hardware manufacturers to release their drivers in the Open Source. Still, the usage for Linux remains sub optimal in the sense that even though the hardware is made to work, the full functionality is not utilised. For example, my laptop speakers are dolby enabled and can create a variety of sound effects depending on the equaliser settings in Vista. Even though the sound works in Linux, the effects don’t. In effect, it doesn’t really translate into “customer delight”.

I installed Open Suse (which is rpm based distro) and started missing the convenience of Debian. Still, it has really come in a long way from what the earlier versions had been and as I understand, a lot of work is being devoted to making majority of laptops work. I feel that at this pace, it would truly take a lot of time before anything meaningful materialises and an ordinary user would really need some working knowlede of command line interface to make things work for him/her in Linux.

This brings us to the questions that I had raised about copyright and the copyleft. There are no clear cut winners here and it only depends on the nummber of people propping up either side of the divide. I have my system in a dual boot and for “emergency” while travelling or for WiFi access, I have to depend on Vista. Maybe perhaps, in the near future, the distros would be polsihed enough to translate into a happy user experience. Otherwise, presently, I am sticking on to Dual Boot solely because of idealism for Linux and nothing else.