Obviously, I think this is a good move. To recap switching to Yahoo for search would have alienated users because it’s a worse search engine, but more important would have overwritten people’s existing experience on upgrade.

In an email to the ubuntu-devel mailing list titled “Follow up to Default Search Provider Changes for 10.04” Rick Spencer writes:

Each release we determine the best default web browser and the best default search engine for Ubuntu. When choosing the best default search provider, we consider factors such as user experience, user preferences, and costs and benefits for Ubuntu and the browsers and other projects that make up Ubuntu. Up until Ubuntu 9.10 these defaults have always been Firefox and Google. Earlier in the 10.04 cycle I announced that we would be changing the default search provider to Yahoo!, and we implemented that change for several milestones.

However, for the final release, we will use Google as the default provider. I have asked the Ubuntu Desktop team to change the default back to Google as soon as reasonably possible, but certainly by final freeze on April 15th.

It was not our intention to “flap” between providers, but the underlying circumstances can change unpredictably. In this case, choosing Google will be familiar to everybody upgrading from 9.10 to 10.04 and the change will only be visible to those who have been part of the development cycle for 10.04.

All thanks the Ubuntu Masters!

Don’t Downgrade the Experience

He quotes Rick Spencer, Canonical:

No, this will effect [sic] upgrades if the computer is currently set to Google. This is not because of anything special for this particular change. This is because Ubuntu always changes to new defaults for users who are on old defaults.

Once I’ve installed software, it’s no longer “defaults”, it’s my experience. Any change to the experience better be to improve the experience, otherwise you jeopardize alienating me and your other customers.

It Can’t be About Money

The search engine in Firefox is Google because it’s the best (of the infants).

In my co-worker Noël Jackon’s post today “Art First”

I respect Jay-Z for his music, but love the man for his words.

via YouTube - “NY-Z” – An ABSOLUT Collaboration with Jay-Z.

At the Jay-Z saysat the 11:30 mark “it can’t be about money. There has to be something in there that is true to both sides. … when the align … At the end of the day no one loses when it’s like that.”

Stay true to yourself, and true to your customers.

I’m Staying Hopeful

Ubuntu has hugely help make Linux and open source flavors many more people can enjoy.

I’m staying hopeful that Ubuntu will stay focus on their customers’ experience!

In the meantime, I’m also staying pragmatic and swallowing bitter proprietary medicine everyday.

Having Fun

My co-worker Alex “Viper” today shared this parody of Jay-Z “Empire State of Mind” titled “Galactic Empire State of Mind” by College Humor:

Customers’ care about one thing, a good experience.

April 8th Update: Yahoo will not be the default search engine in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. Related article “Ubuntu Linux Still Searching Google“

I’ll likely never start up Windows again, but I’d like to have it available just in case my need becomes great in this Windoze world. Re-partitioning later could destroy your Mac OS X installation and all your precious data that you have on. Better to get it out of the way right away.

I do a similar thing if setting up a non-Mac desktop or laptop, but there I install Linux Ubuntu, and Windows.

I like to imagine Apple adding to the end of their beautiful Mac setup guide a suggestion to delay playing with your new tool and to install Windows right away. Now that would be awkward.

Or I imagine being able to order from Apple with Windows pre-installed. Makes me laugh, partially because it makes too much sense.

“Government buyers are using an exception in provincial law that allows them to buy directly from a proprietary vendor when there are no options available, but Facil said that loophole is being abused…”

The article has the tantalizing title of “Quebec government sued for buying Microsoft software“, but the heart of the matter is that Quebec is being sued for not accepting other bids. This policy is an anti-competitive business practice, and by effect anti- open source.

Quite a few of the comments in the article try to scapegoat the issue saying the government also relies on other vendors that have Microsoft Windows only solutions, but no one is arguing flip the switch and suffer. A government’s needs aren’t short term, and the very job of these policy analysts and technology procurement specialists is to weigh the options and total cost of ownership over the long-term.

It’s frightening that not only do they think there are no other options, but they are standing behind a law that shuts down all conversations. Their own belief that they are locked in, should scream to work towards alternatives. For a public office, important measures are openness and public value.

Another argument used by commenters to defend the current policy is that open source has a different, often worse user interface and experience. This isn’t really the case. There are a large variety of open source solutions with some mimicking Microsoft products and others having focused task based experiences. With choice, with open source, they can best meet the needs of their customers.

The last favorite scapegoat is that open source is free, and that this means that it’s unsupported. Many companies have built or reshaped their business around providing world class support of open source including IBM, Sun, Novel, Oracle, RedHat, and Canonical (Ubuntu). This won’t be profitable if the software products themselves weren’t world class. Canonical’s Ubuntu Support is even headquartered in Montreal, Quebec.

This policy hints at Canadian goverment offices being behind the curve. They have a great opportunity to review and measure how many other countries are using open source, and demonstrate how open standards and open technologies is how industry and government are investing in themselves and their members.

Cameron Field twittered “Anyone know how to install WordPress on a Microsoft Office Live hosted site/domain?”

Intrigued by what “Microsoft Office Live” is, I google it and go to smallbusiness.officelive.com, but instead of finding out what it is, I was rudely redirected to http://home.officelive.com/Misc/CompatibleShell.aspx?linkId=UnsupportedBrowser and greeted with

To use Microsoft Office Live, your computer must meet one of the following requirements:

* Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or 7, running on Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 or Windows Vista. You can download Internet Explorer from the Windows Internet Explorer page.

* Firefox 2.0, running on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, or Mac OS X 10.2.x and later. You can download Firefox 2.0 from the Firefox download page.

So, not only is the site checking what browser I’m running, but what operating system I’m running the browser on. Maybe there is a legitimate technical reason why this site doesn’t work for Firefox running on Ubuntu, but that would surprise me as I can’t imagine why integration with Mac OS X could work without any easy solution also for Linux.

Assuming there is a technical reason, the saddest part is the missed opportunity of at least giving me information about the site.

I’m filing this one Optimized Under.

System>Administration>Synaptic Package Manager is the common way to install software, but for the dyed-in-the-wool geek, it has to be done by the command line.

I’ve been careful not to dirty my Dell Dimension E520, aka delin, with every package under the sun, preferring to keep it pristine and do the dirty work on the ThinkPad. Today, I went to install VirtualBox to give me some spaces to play in.

apt-get is old faithful, but years ago, I started using aptitude because of its ability to clean up related software (dependencies) when you remove software (package).

Doing some research now, I see that apt-get has had equivalent functionality since Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft), with the command sudo apt-get autoremove [application name].

So now, I have to break myself of the aptitude habit. I would sudo apt-get autoremove aptitude , but like it seems to be part of ubuntu-minimal — why?

Thursday, April 3rd Update: Thank you AmyRose! She explained that the default behavior of aptitude is to install “recommended packages”. I can see why this would be desirably by many people, but also why for many people such as myself this is very awkward default behavior. Why would the source code by a recommend package for Virtual Box? I would dislike to try and add a single KDE application and next thing I know am running Kubuntu instead of Ubuntu.

What are the advantages of aptitude today?


$ sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose
The following extra packages will be installed:
libqt3-mt libxalan110 libxerces27 virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.22-14-generic
Suggested packages:
libqt3-mt-psql libqt3-mt-mysql libqt3-mt-odbc xalan
Recommended packages:
virtualbox-ose-source
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libqt3-mt libxalan110 libxerces27 virtualbox-ose
virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.22-14-generic
0 upgraded, 5 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.