yelvington.com

Forget about the world record. Just download and install Firefox 3 today and take a moment to celebrate the significance of open Web standards and diversity of platforms.

Here's why it's important. In order for a robust marketplace of independent products and services to flourish on the Internet, we need the level playing field that open standards provide. The alternative -- the closed, proprietary world that Microsoft and others have tried in vain to promote -- inevitably feeds a dangerous concentration of power that leads to abuses. We've seen this happen all through human history, the creation of walls and toll collectors whose effect is to retard progress and cripple commerce to the benefit of the big and powerful, and the detriment of the individual and the inventor.

Firefox is just a Web browser, and version 3 is just another version. But its success -- and the standards-conforming successes of others, such as Webkit (Safari on Mac, Konqueror on Linux) and Opera -- helps hold at bay those who would capture the Web for their own benefit. Download, install, and celebrate.

It should raise some eyebrows that MySQL AB, the Swedish maker of a free database management system, has sold itself to Sun Microsystems at a price that Cnet estimates at (begin Dr. Evil impersonation) one... billion ... dollars. Hopefully it also will open some minds about alternative business models and "low end" innovation.

MySQL's revenue model is best described as "voluntary pay." Anybody can download and use the software at no charge. Businesses are encouraged to sign up for support services, but that's completely optional.

The "voluntary pay" model isn't unique to software; quite a weekly newspapers use it, and some dailies are beginning to experiment with a mix of free and paid circulation that effectively is "voluntary pay" for targeted neighborhoods. It's an intriguing option for a print medium that lets the newspaper control its distribution while continuing to enjoy some of the revenue benefits of the old model.

In the music business, Radiohead stirred things up by offering their latest album as a free "pay what you want, if you want" download. Of course, other music businesses such as Magnatune have long offered unusual pricing models. Magnatune lets you listen online all you want, and pay a price of your own choosing to download files.

And in Kirkland, WA -- the east side of the Seattle area -- there's even a coffeeshop and deli founded by a Google programmer that seems to be surviving on a voluntary-pay basis. The wi-fi is free, too.

The MySQL deal also is significant because MySQL is a perfect example of a low-end disruptive innovation.

You don't have to stir the anthill very much to discover that a lot of highly paid, highly trained Oracle database administrators regard MySQL as junk, a toy, beneath consideration. Blah blah constraints, blah blah referential integrity, blah blah transaction rollback.

But MySQL was "good enough" to create entirely new markers and enable entirely new services, including this blog, which sits atop a MySQL data store. And as MySQL improved, it began displacing expensive solutions in increasingly more mission-critical settings.

Now it's the engine behind Google AdSense, which of course is the revenue engine behind Google itself. Good enough, and then some.

Larry Magid has a warm and fuzzy piece about Linux on the desktop on nytimes.com today.

I previously wrote about how my elderly mother is now running Linux on her laptop, which was unusable under Microsoft Vista.

My mother-in-law also is running Linux as a result of a hard disk failure on her PC. I stuck an Ubuntu Live CD in the disk drive and let her run from CD for a couple of weeks, then installed a new hard drive and made Linux permanent last weekend.

In terms of day-to-day usability, there's really no difference between Vista and Linux (or for that matter Mac OSX), except for Vista's habit of bombarding you with security warnings.

A web browser is a web browser. Email programs are pretty much all alike. In fact, we generally run OS-specific versions of the same software on all three platforms.

Last weekend was Middle Daughter's 15th birthday, and she got an Acer 3680 laptop. I was surprised that it took over 30 minutes to run Vista for the first time. I started grandma's Linux hard disk installation at the same time, and Linux won.

Linux came up fast and snappy on an aging desktop with 256 megs of memory. Vista came up slow and squishy, full of popups and bearing a prominent warning (probably from antivirus banditware) that the system had serious security issues.

The Acer has "only" half a gig of memory, so Vista is slow. It's not as bad as my mom's dual-core Toshiba was (which is to say: useless), but both Microsoft and Acer should be ashamed.

So I installed Linux on a second disk partition. Installation was fast, easy and automated.

Up and running. Fast and snappy. Tons of software.

Then a problem arose: wireless networking.

Linux has excellent networking software, but the Atheros wi-fi hardware comes from one of those companies that doesn't provide Linux drivers, or cooperate with Linux developers. Worse, they revise their hardware in ways that break perfectly good drivers.

So the developers have to guess. I managed to get the wi-fi working using some guessware that I tracked down using Google, but that introduced some nasty bugs that occasionally lock up the laptop. Not good.

These problems undoubtedly will be fixed soon, probably without any help from Atheros, but in the meantime Middle Daughter is stuck with slow-and-squishy Vista and its security and usability problems.

The bottom line is pretty much the same as Magid outlined in his NYT piece. Linux is ready. Grandma can use it. Kids can use it. Installation is not a problem. In many dimensions, especially performance, security and nagware-free user experience, it's superior.

If you don't collide with hardware that the manufacturer won't support on Linux, you're set.

If you do, you're stuck, at least until the Linux developers guess their way to success.

In July I ranted about Microsoft Vista, sparked by my elderly mother's acquisition of a laptop computer that came infested with it. I vowed to replace it with Linux, and the result was a prominent link on Google searches for "I hate Vista," a steady stream of comments from irritated Vista users, and a couple of angry rants from Microsoft fanboys.

I spent the holiday weekend in Columbia, Mo., where my mother lives, and where I'm speaking Tuesday at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. And I took advantage of the opportunity to make good on my threat.

I discovered that Toshiba had shipped Vista on a dual-core laptop with only 512MB of memory. With that hardware, Vista is unusable. Clicking on any application took three to five minutes just to get a window open. The options were: Spend a hundred or so on additional RAM, or nuke Vista forever. I took the easy option.

Now Ubuntu Linux is installed. Launching Firefox takes three seconds. Opening email is instantaneous. Connect a camera via USB and it's detected automatically. Picasa imports and organizes everything. It all Just Works. And no viruses, or popups, or popups from antivirus programs.