It's Time For the Linux Community to Rally Around One of Our Own

As some of you have undoubtedly seen, I published a piece this morning on O'Reilly Broadcast about the unfortunate situation Ken Starks and Diane Franklin of the Helios Project find themselves in. Diane had a stroke, the main arteries which deliver blood to her brain are largely blocked, and she needs surgery which may very well be the difference between life and death. If you haven't already please follow the link and read the piece I wrote.

Anyway, I wanted to write about it again, this time from a more personal perspective. This post is unusually long, even for me, and I have been known to get long winded now and again. Please bear with me and read it through.

Diane, Ken's partner, is 64, retired, and living on Social Security alone. She isn't eligible for Medicare yet and her puny $1,200 per month income is too much for her to qualify for Medicaid in the great state of Texas. Diane has worked as the Helios Project's Logistics and Planning Director for the past year without renumeration. She gave her time freely to help underprivileged kids. As is all too often the case in our great American society, no good deed goes unpunished.

As you might guess she can barely make ends meet at all on that income and she surely cannot afford health insurance. I know what health insurance costs for single coverage for a woman in her 50s very well, since that is my situation. It's prohibitively expensive. I can only imagine what it would cost for a woman of 64. I'll save the obvious political rant for later. I don't want politics to distract from what is at stake here.

I've never met Diane or Ken. Heck, I spoke to Ken for the very first time on the phone last night. My own history with Ken, as some of you may remember, got off to an inauspicious start. To say he rubbed me the wrong way would be an understatement and a half. For those who may have missed the little incident from 2008 let me tell you about it.

Ken was deeply involved in something called Lindependence. Part of the idea was to get an entire town to switch from Windows to Linux. OK, it was a small town in California, but still, getting an entire town to agree on anything takes some doing. Ken's style back then was confrontational. Heck, he even blogged about a physical confrontation he got into later over his Linux advocacy, but that's besides the point. Anyway, I was writing for O'Reilly quite a bit back then and Ken wanted publicity. He e-mailed me.

Ken is, to say the least, very passionate about Linux. I read his website, his blog, his comparison of running Windows to a "ball and chain" and found it full of zealotry and way, way , way over the top. I wrote a very formal, business like response to "Mr. Starks" declining to cover his story. I wasn't alone. Most of the tech press had pretty much decided to ignore him en masse. Well, my e-mail rubbed Ken the wrong way every bit as much as his writing had done to me. I was the blogger Ken called a "coward" in this 2008 post from his blog.

I have no idea if my e-mail had an impact or not. I don't know if others found a more effective way to critique his work. I do know that Ken's once overly long, wordy and sometimes difficult to follow prose became crisper and more precise. The confrontational attitude slowly disappeared. Thankfully the passion never dissipated and Ken became a very, very effective advocate for Linux.

His Helios Project, which recycles old computers for kids who otherwise cannot afford them and successfully solicits fund to make sure these kids get Internet connectivity to go with it undoubtedly helped. The mellower Ken won awards for his public service and earned praise for his selfless and, I should add, full-time efforts to help those in need in his community. Ken also does some Linux consulting work but, based on what I've read, his income is scarcely better than Diane's. Neither of them can afford much. Their reward comes in what they do for others. Oh, and yeah, somewhere along the line I earned Ken's respect as well, as evidenced by this 2010 blog post.

In contrast to Ken's very public persona, both as a Linux advocate and community activist, is Diane's very much behind the scenes contribution. Ken described her work in the Helios Project to me as "critical." From what I gather she has made serious improvements in the gathering and allocation of resources, making the Project all the more effective. Now the Project is on hold as Ken scrambles to find help for Diane.

In a few short years Ken Starks has become one of the best advocates for Linux I know of. There was a time I never imagined I would say such a thing. Now it simply is true. His work for the less fortunate people of his Austin, Texas community is a great example of one of what the first President Bush called "a thousand points of light." Let's make sure that light is neither dimmed nor extinguished. All of us in the Linux community need to gather around and help a little.

There are tens of millions of Linux users around the world. If 10,000 of us gave just $10 to fund Diane's surgery it would be paid for. It really doesn't take much. The Linux community, the public, non-corporate face of who we are, will be well served in Ken and Diane can get back to doing what they love to do.

Ken has setup a PayPal account to allow those who would like to contribute to do so. Contributions should be made to dianekfranklin@hotmail.com. For those without a credit/debit card or a PayPal account contributions can be sent to the address found here. I run a small consulting business that recently lost it's largest customer. Add some slow payers and I am not exactly having an easy time of it right now. Despite that, I am expecting some checks to come in this week and I will do my small part. I am asking you to do the same.

There is one other thing I am going to ask: the major Linux portal sites are not covering this story. One has a prohibition against fund raising. I don't know what excuse the others have. This needs to be a grass roots effort within the community to get the word out. If you have a blog, a Facebook page, anything at all related to Linux or helping needy kids or whatever then, please, share Ken and Diane's story. It can still have a happy ending.

Circling The Wagons

As anyone who reads my blog regularly knows by now I do a fair amount of writing about Linux and Linux distributions for a number of websites. Over the past year I've been paid to do so, moving me out of the "just another blogger" category and into the tech journalist category. Once upon a time when someone called me a "journalist" I would dispute the label but writing professionally has changed that.

Writing honestly about Linux distributions is not a way to become popular or make friends. When a given distribution, any distribution, has problems and a reporter writes about it there are always fans who will circle the wagons and/or go on the attack. I am very used to that by now. It's no surprise at all that has happened with a few CentOS loyalists. What is surprising is that it is continuing more than two weeks after I last wrote about the subject. Ken Leyba's post on the Cooking With Linux blog gets things seriously wrong on a number of levels.

A netbook is nothing more than a small notebook. Mr. Leyba is completely off base when he claims otherwise. Machines like this have been used in business for about forever. I remember the CEO and other senior execs of a company I supported when I contracted to IBM Global Services using the itty bitty Toshiba Libretto with a 7" screen for travel back in 1999. Nothing has changed all that much other than the fact that you no longer pay a premium for tiny and that has helped make small machines popular. Linux makes them more productive.

Enterprise Linux is marketed for the desktop. To claim that CentOS, an EL clone, is only for servers and that my experiment was somehow invalid because it was done on a desktop/notebook/netbook is patently ridiculous. When I was consulting for Red Hat in 2004-2005 I visited a number of companies that were and undoubtedly still are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on desktops, workstations, and yes, on laptops. Those enterprise customers would have considered a failure to deliver a Firefox patch that closed a number of critical security vulnerabilities to be a serious problem. The idea that a Firefox patch is irrelevant on an enterprise distribution as some have claimed is simply preposterous.

CentOS has to prove they can get patches out on a timely basis to be taken seriously as an enterprise product. Their track record in that area over the past year has been atrocious. It wasn't one Firefox package. It was a year of things arriving late, sometimes months late.

The response from CentOS developers to the security issue in the comments of my business-centric article for O'Reilly Broadcast on the subject was actually spot on:

"Your point about the security updates is well founded, we try a lot harder to make sure we get things right and we have a much more involved process to establish when the 'right' is. An easy way to work through this would be if Red Hat were to share more info with us. Not sure if that is likely to happen and what the timeframe for that would be, but over the course of the next few months we hope to have a more transparent process in place that lets users track exactly what is going on, where and how."

When patches are a few days late it can, indeed, have something to do with the upstream vendor. When they are two months late that seems entirely unlikely. The fact that a member of the CentOS development team is owning the problem making a commitment to "get things right" in the future is a very positive step.

My complaints about the dependency on third party repositories and the lack of packages in general is an issue that is hardly unique to CentOS. I raised the same issue when I reviewed Slackeare 12.1 last year. It's a significant issue for any desktop/laptop user, not just on netbooks. The need to go to third parties for packages to adequately support newer hardware isn't netbook specific either.

I also feel that the issues around the open letter to Lance Davis called into question how that distro is being managed. Yes, it was blown way out of proportion by the tech media and I said as much in my O'Reilly Broadcast article. That one issue may well have been solved and I certainly bear the CentOS devs no ill will. That doesn't change the fact that Scientific Linux has done a better job with getting patches out on a timely basis. It is not dependent on a few volunteers and has the backing of and funding from major laboratories and universities all over the world. From a business perspective that makes Scientific Linux a safer choice for an Enterprise Linux clone.

The attempt to replicate my business environment on my netbook was a valid experiment. I thought other Linux users, those who think highly of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as I do, might want to do the same. The original DistroWatch Weekly feature article documented the difficulties in doing so. The post here which Mr. Leyba responded to was the fourth of five if you include the original DistroWatch piece and the business-centric O'Reilly piece. Considering that I linked back to the preceding articles should be a very clear message that the one post shouldn't be taken out of context but as part of a larger whole. In any case it wasn't a "rant" against CentOS as Mr. Leyba claims, but rather it tied the proverbial ribbons on the end of my experiment and explained why I decided the whole thing was more trouble than it was worth.

I did make a mistake in putting issues regarding servers and desktop-specific issues in one blog post. While many of the issues involved impact both areas the fact that I did not make a clear enough delineation between the two almost certainly generated misunderstanding. In that sense I did fail to communicate clearly. Mea culpa.

It's important to note that the experiment really wasn't a total failure. In the end I did get the netbook hardware to be 100% functional running CentOS. I also managed to improve performance significantly. What I also did was document the difficulties involved. I don't think there was anything wrong with doing so.

Mr. Leyba has shown integrity by allowing me to respond to him and to his readers directly on the Cooking With Linux blog. I do appreciate that and I will certainly afford him the same opportunity if he wishes to comment.

I thought I had put this issue to bed and moved on a couple of weeks ago. Clearly some people had other ideas. That's perfectly fine. In the final analysis nothing has really changed. I stand by all the pieces I wrote on the subject of CentOS. I'm using Scientific Linux instead and that will continue to be my recommendation for anyone who wants a no cost, no support Enterprise Linux clone either in the server room or on the desktop.