Author: Lee Schlesinger
Moving on, Perens, the executive director of the Desktop Linux Consortium, predicted 2004 will bring serious desktop deployments. “We have the software that 80% of the world needs,” he said, including browsers and office applications. This year will see improved integration and bug filtering, Perens said, but he thinks we are at least a year away from a stable Linux kernel for laptops because of flaws with ACPI.
Perens outlined his vision for UserLinux, an effort to decouple Linux from large, highly capitalized companies, aimed at letting enterprises add seats without an incremental cost. The proposed distribution is based on Debian, which, he said, with close to 10,000 packages and 1,000 developers, is larger than Red Hat and SuSE. On top of the software “we’re assembling a global support organization” to make UserLinux appealing to a wide audience. Perens still intends to include only GNOME as a window manager in UserLinux, maintaining that it’s confusing for users to have two window managers, and a burden to support departments. KDE will still be available for those who choose to use it, but it will not be an official part of the distribution.
Perens feels the biggest challenge to open source going forward is software patents. In the U.S., 50% to 95% of software patents should not be granted, he said, because they are not inventions and are written extremely broadly. He expects that after SCO suit is over, we’ll see a number of patent lawsuits brought against Linux. Since one American intellectual property organization he cited estimates that it costs $2.5m for each side to fight a patent lawsuit, any such legal action could be crippling.
In closing, the speaker and author noted that “perens” is the Latin word for traveling. It seemed a fitting appellation for the peripatetic pundit.