Most of us reading this are probably accustomed to the idea of getting Linux for the cost of an opinion about the weather — in other words, nothing. But now Ubuntu, arguably the most visible of Linux distributions, is hitting store shelves at Best Buy for the practically impulse-buy cost of $19.99 USD.

Why pay? Two reasons: One, you get printed documentation — something people have increasingly lamented the loss of, although the cost of printing in general (and the search ability of electronic files) has pushed paper docs aside.

The other, and more significant reason, is sixty days of unlimited tech support courtesy of Canonical. Two months is a fairly decent margin of time for someone to install Ubuntu and work their way through most showstopper issues, and the most recent Ubuntu comes with a very nice gamut of tools to make migration and dual-booting a lot easier than it usually is.

The price is definitely right. The last time I saw boxed Linux on the shelf of my local Best Buy, it was SuSE, and it sported a pricetag of almost $100.00 USD (A quick search of Best Buy’s site shows they don’t even keep SuSE in stock anymore; not much of a surprise, there.)

I’d love to not only see this take off, but spawn some competition in the same space — say, perhaps from an outfit that uses the same pricing model but uses Fedora or even OpenSuSE as their base distribution.

It’s been a year since the GPLv3 was introduced to the open source world — so how’s it doing? That’s the subject of two surveys currently being conducted to track open source license usage and conversion.

The first survey, conducted by Black Duck Software, shows the GPLv3 coming it at No. 7 out of the top 20 open source licenses used amongst projects polled.

Not surprisingly, the GPLv2 filled the top slot by a gigantic margin — 57.81% — while the GPLv3 had a 1.82% share.

That’s still not too bad for a license that was only introduced a year ago; the same survey puts the Apache License at 2.77% and the Mozilla Public License at 1.29%.

The second survey, courtesy of Palamida, also features some detailed quotes from various software outfits about GPLv3 adoption.

Some fairly famous names are in that list — SugarCRM’s Community Edition and Samba, for instance, have adopted Version 3, although there are still plenty of big names sticking with what they have.

I’m not terribly surprised by this, since I didn’t figure the GPLv3 was going to be an automatic upgrade for most people.

One thing that would be useful to know, although admittedly not the easiest thing to harvest, is activity statistics about the projects in question — maybe by using the activity stats from Sourceforge if the project’s hosted there.

This would give us some idea of the degree of usage or participation for each project. It’s one thing to say “2,800 open source projects use the GPLv3,” but what percentage of those 2,800 projects are, say, part of the top 100 or even 500 projects at Sourceforge?

Finally, a quick and admittedly unscientific glance at the lists of projects in both surveys shows a healthy mix of project types — a little of everything under the sun, from what I can tell.

It’ll be interesting to see where things stand in another year — or even by the end of this one.

Want to give the Firefox 3 beta a spin, but you don’t want to go through the tedium of backing up your profiles and personal data? Here’s an easy solution if you’re a Windows user.

The folks at PortableApps.com — all open source, all no-install, all the time — have just debuted a new build of Firefox 3 beta 4.

For those not familiar with the Portable Apps paradigm, their mission is to provide you with custom builds of the best open source applications which can run without needing to be formally installed.

They can be mounted on a USB flash drive or copied into a directory and run as-is. They also provide a handy application organizer and launcher which works the same way, and I’ve stumped for them whenever they come up with a noteworthy new edition of one of their apps.

The best thing about the portable edition of FF 3 b4 is that it runs totally separately from any other instances of Firefox in your system, including your user profiles.

Typically, whenever I tested a new build of Firefox, I had to back up my user profile just to be on the safe side. PortableApps’s Firefox uses its own separate user-profile instance, stored along with the application.

There’s a couple of downsides to this. One is that if you want to use your existing bookmarks, you need to export them from your existing instance of Firefox and re-import them.

The other is that things like password fields aren’t inherited, either, but I’ve been using the impossibly handy (and also open source) SuperGenPass to manage passwords, so having passwords saved in form fields isn’t crucial in my case

This isn’t the first beta build of Firefox that has premiered through their system, but it’s one of the first I feel wholly comfortable working with on a daily basis.

So far it’s been extremely stable, markedly faster than even the “accelerated” 2.x builds I’ve used (like Pigfoot), and racks up a good deal less CPU usage when running JavaScript applications, like many of the Ajax-based tools I use for managing web content.

I’m still getting used to the new ways things like bookmarks are handled — for one, the “Smart Bookmarks” system doesn’t particularly interest me; I don’t like it when software tries to second-guess my work habits.

But on the whole I see the finished version of FF 3 in my future — and frankly, the current beta 4 version is already a big part of my present.

Yahoo will support digital identity framework OpenID 2.0 in beta form January 30.

Yahoo announced this morning that it would support the technology, which allows users to consolidate their Internet identities. Plaxo and JanRain are working with Yahoo so users don’t have to create separate IDs and logins at the Web sites, blogs, and profile pages they visit — as long as the sites support OpenID 2.0.

The OpenID Foundation and community also helped create specifications to improve security and convenience of OpenID.

Users can customize OpenID identifiers on me.yahoo.com or type “www.yahoo.com” or “www.flickr.com” on sites that support the platform.

Yahoo said users will be protected by the company’s sign-in seal while they surf the Web. Web sites can also add an option to allow users to sign in with their Yahoo ID. E-mail and instant messaging addresses are withheld as users log in, and that creates a barrier to phishing or other attacks, Yahoo said.

“A Yahoo ID is one of the most recognizable and useful accounts to have on the Internet and with our support of OpenID, it will become even more powerful,”

– Ash Patel, EVP of platforms and infrastructure.

Scott Kveton, chairman of the board for the OpenID Foundation, said Yahoo’s support of “an open Web” validates the OpenID movement and immediately triples the number of people who can use OpenID. Yahoo has 248 million users.

“With Yahoo actively engaged with the OpenID Foundation and its community to promote OpenID, Yahoo’s users will be able to more easily access the many sites across the Web that support the standard, and the potential for access to Yahoo’s vast international user base will create an even more powerful incentive for additional Web sites to begin accepting OpenID users.”

– Scott Kveton, chairman of the board for the OpenID Foundation.

Joseph Smarr, chief platform architect of Plaxo, said the move also supports data portability for various Web services.

Larry Drebes, founder and VP of engineering for JanRain, said that secure, portable, digital identities are keys to advancing Web applications.

More than 120 million URLs and 9,000 sites support Open ID, created by open source developers.

Source: Yahoo! Press Release

Not all open source software is Serious Business.

A project that caught my attention in the last couple of days is a port of the classic Infogrames / EA title SimCity — released for just about every platform known to man — into an open-source implementation named Micropolis.

Thank programmer Don Hopkins for his hard work.

Since the original SimCity source code has been released under the GPL, he decided to make a version that runs on Linux and port it to the OLPC.

Said port — named “Micropolis” for the same reason that community builds of Firefox are not called Firefox — has been heavily rewritten to run well as a modern application, and is still a bit of an ongoing project.

The whole thing is available either as a source package or a compiled Win32 binary, the latter of which isn’t itself an actual playable version of the game but just a demo — for the time being.

Bill Simser has been writing a series of posts documenting how to create a playable game from this code on Win32, and for anyone interested in programming — and not just game programming — it’s absorbing reading.

I also read with no small amount of fascination the long-term goals for Micropolis — things like multiplayer support and porting to many other languages are all in the works.

I think there’s a lot more than nostalgia at work here. Aside from SimCity being a hugely influential and fun game to begin with, I think game programming is one of the better ways for people to understand open source — either as a programmer or a user.

Once explained in that context, I’d think open source becomes that much easier to understand in other contexts — and concepts like the lvarious licensing schemes and whatnot can be related in a fairly straightforward way.

If there’s one thing about open source that remains something of a mystery to most people, it’s why open source development works the way it does.

You may not persuade people to become programmers, but you can at least make their job a little less mystifying.

On a side note, my longtime favorite open-source game remains NetHack. You’d never think a simple cursor and some ASCII graphics could still be so addictive in this day and age.