Day 3 of the #100DaysToOffload series:

It was recently in the news that the Google axe has once again fallen on one of it’s products. I can’t remember if it was Hangouts, or Google Cloud Print, or some other unfortunate product. The fact of the matter is, Google’s product body count should give anybody pause who is considering using one of their products.

There’s a site called Killed By Google that maintains a list of products that Google has killed over the years. The numbers are staggering, and honestly I couldn’t muster up the energy to try to count them all. Let’s use the scientific term, “lots”.

To me, this illustrates exactly why Open Source is the way to go.

I’m always drawn back to the story of Eazel. It was founded by Andy Hertzfeld in the late 90s, and it lasted less than two years. It made a single product, and most Linux users today probably don’t remember the company or the product it made.

It’s still here though.

The product they made was a file manager called Nautilus. Nautilus was a nice product, and continues to be updated today by the open source community. Since the Eazel days, it’s been incorporated directly into Gnome, and has been renamed GNOME Files. If you’ve used GNOME since 2001, you’ve probably used Nautilus.

This tiny company of less than a hundred people produced a product that has lasted twenty years and continues going strong today, long after the company that made it has fallen from the memory of industry. Compare that to the graveyard of products Google has left in it’s wake. Each time a product gets the axe, the people who use it are left to fend for themselves.

It seems obvious that Open Source is the better way to produce a product.

Day 2 of the #100DaysToOffload series:

I’ve told this story before, and odds are I’ll tell it again. I just haven’t told it here.

Back in the mid 90s, I was in college studying Computer Science. I was living in this double wide trailer house some high school friends owned. The three of us were cramming into this small space. They were both studying Electrical Engineering. When we weren’t studying for school, we were trying to pay our way through by working at a local company that supported the computer systems of the campus. I specialized in desktop Windows repair, and they were the only two Macintosh technicians on campus for Apple systems support.

I don’t remember the exact day, or what I was doing, but I was on my computer in my room when I was invited to see “Windows” running on one of their Macintosh computers. This was before emulation was a big thing, so having Windows on a Mac was a pretty novel idea. When I looked though, things weren’t quite right. It looked really close to Windows, but it wasn’t. I finally got them to cave on the details, and it turns out they were running something called MkLinux on the Mac.

I was absolutely fascinated by this thing they had found. When I found out that they downloaded it free of charge, I wanted to find out right away if there was a “PC version” available for me to use.

At the time, all the development work for the Computer Science department was being done on some Digital Unix systems. Our primary system was called Esus and the secondary system was called Fubar. This was long before people had high speed Internet in their homes, so it was a challenge to use our one phone line to dial up the campus modem bank so I could do my homework. Linux solved my problem of having to dial up to the campus modem bank because everything seemed compatible for me. At least the things I needed. It didn’t take me long to find the “PC version” called Red Hat, and I’ve been using Linux one way or another ever since.

Day 1 of the #100DaysToOffload series:

Many of the people reading this will come to my blog from Mastodon. I spend most of my “Social Media” time there, so that’s how most people will know me. For those that don’t, I want to give a brief explanation of what’s going on here with this #100DaysToOffload stuff.

A good friend of mine, Kev Quirk recently suggested a “100 Days to Offload” challenge. This is a challenge to those individuals with a blog to post one thing a day for 100 days straight. I have a blog, kind of. I’ve written somewhere in the neighborhood of a post a year for the last couple years. Coming up with something to write about for one hundred days straight certainly would be a challenge for me. So, I took it.

I’m not the only one doing this. Kev himself has decided that he’s going to take part, as have others. Several are hosting their blogs on the write.as platform, which makes it easy for anybody interested to follow along. Anybody that uses the tag #100DaysToOffload will show up on write.as’s reader site. You can add that to your favorite RSS reader, or just hit the web page when you’re curious.

Now, there’s no specific theme to this challenge. I can write about anything I want. I’m probably going to try to focus mostly on tech, specifically open source stuff, since that’s what I know. Just don’t be surprised if I throw in something completely off the cuff because I can’t think of anything “techy” to write about on a given day.

OK, I guess that’s enough of the Mikespaining. Let the games begin!