Screw the Year of the Linux Desktop.

Are you still wondering if 2010 will be the year of the Linux desktop? Who cares?

Firstly, The Linux Desktop is progressing by leaps and bounds. In fact it verges on blissful perfection. It doesn't matter if your Grandma or work is using it. It still works and it's still cool as hell. It's not fringe, it's not a stigma. It's here, it's now and it kicks ass.

Secondly, There are cooler things on the horizon that make worrying about acceptance silly.

Sure the G1 was cool and relatively open. But how about the upcoming Android phones? Sure the iPhone gobbled up the smart phone market but Floss is catching up and will soon be dominant.

See, there is something that proprietary can't compete with. Free software is all about what the user want's. It's free, it powerful, it doesn't leave them stranded with vendor lock in and they won't be left unsupported when the next wave of innovation gets crammed down our throat.

It brings up an interesting use case for freedom over closed ideology. As something like the iPhone, iPod or iTunes takes over a market. It can benefit from locking things down. They create a bottle neck that funnels all income to one source. That's great for the company but sucks for the consumer. A recent trend is to use freedoms as a market getting alternative. Creating competition where there wasn't any before.

One such instance is the Amazon mp3 store. They used freedom from DRM to change the game. Now mobile phone companies are doing the same with Android because free software easily fits the bill. You can take it right now and deploy it with a minimum of resources and get it to market. Also, the open development means you will attract enough developers to start catching up with the App Store.

The next cool device running Android is the Barnes and Nobel Nook. An e-book reader that will take on the Amazon kindle. Creating a interesting irony that Amazon stole market share with more freedom and now B&N will steal market share doing the same.

When will they learn that the more freedom they afford their users the more competitive they will be in the future.

So anyways, back at the point. This is the year of the Linux personal device. When the coolest devices that your friends drool after aren't Apple or Microsoft but Linux.

OSM Live

So, recent events that have come out of the community around my podcast have lead to the creation of a media experiment for us. See, we set up a streaming server so we could put up a live stream of the podcast as we recorded it. This isn't unique as quite a few of our podcasting friends do this all ready. However, having a server setup means that you could use it to stream anything anytime! That led my co-host to think that he could do a some live performances. Then the though comes to us "Hey we are all musicians, why couldn't we setup some live shows?"

After some experiments I discovered that it's brain dead simple to stream using my Zoom H4 and my Asus eeePC using the program BUTT. Another friend of the show, who is an amazing bass player and an owner of an H4 and EEEpc setup, streamed a rehearsal and a couple of his bands shows live. So right now we have about 3 musicians that are streaming live music.

This has given birth to a fun project called OSMLive. It's a chance for musicians in the Free Culture community to share their art. The concept is simple, we handle the scheduling of great artists and you tune in. Simple, right? The streams are all using the free ogg vorbis format that can be played in the latest Firefox or using the very popular and cross platform VLC media player.

More information on how and when to tune in as well as schedualing your own show can be found at http://live.pipemanmusic.com. There is a calendar and an rss feed for the shows. You can contact us about the show at live at pipemanmusic.com