Nice in theory, but...

Every so often someone comes out with The Next Big Thing. And they market the theory behind it, people say 'hey, that makes sense', and people start buying the product.

But what if the theory is flawed or incomplete? What do you do with an invention that doesn't really work, because the idea wasn't properly thought through? Often it takes something going out of style before people look back at a flawed product and ask 'what were we thinking?'

Ergonomic keyboards

A good example is a computing product that came out of the 90s. The ergonomic Microsoft Natural keyboard, which splits the keyboard layout into left and right sections that are angled and tilted to point in the direction of your elbows. The idea was based on the fact that your forearms form an inverted V when you type. By putting a kink in the middle of the keyboard, you wouldn't need to kink your wrists in order to have your hands positioned over the keys with your fingers pointing directly forward.

The obvious problem: nobody actually types with their hands positioned that way. Human fingers are different lengths; your little finger is significantly shorter than your index finger, and there's an approximate graduation in lengths between them. That means that when you position your fingers in the home position to type on an ordinary keyboard, your hands form an inverted V too. Using a Microsoft Natural keyboard actually forces you to either kink your wrists the other way, or spread your elbows out further than you normally would.

There's a keyboard on the market that's been in continuous production since the 1980s. It's known the Model M, and is now sold as the Unicomp Classic. It has the same straight layout as any cheap keyboard, yet enjoys a bit of a following among writers and programmers as a comfortable keyboard to type on. The difference is in the internal mechanism of the keys.

Now a typical keyboard registers keystrokes on a 'membrane' under the keys. The membrane consists of two layers of plastic, with screen-painted electrical traces running across them, that are kept slightly separated from each other by an intermediate layer which has holes where the keys are. When you press a key, you flatten a silicone dome which pushes the two membrane layers into contact with each other and completes the circuit in that spot. When you release the key, the silicone dome springs back into shape, and the key pops up.

A Model M also uses a membrane arrangement, but rather than having a rubber dome, it has a spring and hammer mechanism under each key. When a key gets two thirds of the way down, the spring buckles, causing its base to pivot and causing a hammer to strike the membrane, at this point, you hear a loud click and the resistance beneath your finger disappears. From here, your finger muscles (which are actually located further up your arm) instinctively relax as the key hits the bottom, so you avoid straining your tendons.

Old > new ?

How can a thirty year old keyboard design possibly be better than something you get with a new computer today? Well, the Model M was designed by IBM in the heat of the computer wars of the 80s. IBM invested a lot of resources into developing it, and it wasn't a cheap keyboard to manufacture. The reason was because Apple computers were all sold with rubber-dome keyboards. Selling a computer with a higher quality keyboard that didn't feel cheap to type on gave IBM a competitive advantage in the world of business computing, at a time when a lot of personal computers on the market must have seemed (to serious business people) like toys.

So the question: 'what were we thinking?' goes both ways. Sub-optimal design often falls out of favour over time, but a lot of good design gets forgotten too. Design priorities change, and the original vision gets neglected. It's important for designers in today's world to not only create new visions of the future, but also to look back at understanding and appreciating what the vision used to be. Today's computing devices have evolved out of (and bear remnants of) a history of changing design visions, so understanding them is certainly worthwhile.

Freer than Linux?

Linux is getting a lot of attention right now.

Android, arguably the hottest OS right now, is powered by the Linux kernel behind the scenes. Desktop distributions like Ubuntu and Mint are gaining in popularity at the expense of the traditional inflexible (but easily manageable) paradigm of all PCs running Windows. As far as driver support among PC manufacturers goes, Linux comes second only to Windows. Linux works across multiple architectures. Broadband routers run it. Smart TVs run it. Even our upcoming ARM-based embedded home automation operating system, ThermOS, is built on GNU/Linux underneath.

So. What about BSD?

BSD?

Like GNU/Linux, BSD is based on the Unix operating system that came out in the early 1970s. It aims at the same POSIX standard for Unix compatibility as Linux, which means Linux applications are pretty-much source-compatible with BSD. On the desktop, the main two distributions that others are based on are FreeBSD (the more popular branch) and OpenBSD (a slightly more ideologically-driven branch, with heavy focus on security). PC-BSD is a user-friendly distribution that is based on FreeBSD (in much the same way as Ubuntu is based on Debian in the Linux sphere).

BSD operating system distributions are solid products, with a track record spanning decades of legendary reliability. Many Linux programs can be made to run on BSD, and the computing experience feels a little bit more responsive and robust than Linux does. The OpenBSD community even prides itself on regularly and proactively auditing the codebase to weed out potential issues before they become problems. OpenBSD has only had a handful of security vulnerabilities over the course of its entire history; a point that gets prominent mention on their website. If there's anything wrong with BSD, it's that the community isn't big enough for things like driver support to get the attention they deserve. So why is nobody using it?

Nobody's using it?

On the contrary, BSD is a lot more popular than you might think. Apple's Darwin operating system (better known for it's consumer branches: iOS and Mac OSX), is Apple's own BSD distribution, and borrows heavily from the FreeBSD branch. There are literally hundreds of millions of Apple devices out there running BSD. If you open up a terminal window on a Mac, the command line experience is not all that different to what you get on a typical GNU/Linux system.

Now that we've introduced BSD, we can get to the crux of this post: both the Linux and BSD communities are driven by the ideal of free software, but they differ drastically in terms what freedom means in the software world.

A different licensing philosophy

GNU/Linux is based on the GNU Public License (GPL), a multipage document that requires overt publication of all source code used in a piece of software, and that you freely allow others to modify your work to make it their own, and redistribute it as they wish. It's a 'viral' license in that if you use someone else's GPL'd code in your work, then you must distribute your work under the same license, so that others can continue to alter and modify that code within your program.

BSD takes on a different philosophy. The BSD license is limited to a few short paragraphs, rather than being pages long, and states that the code is free but without warranty, and does not impose restrictions on how you re-use or re-purpose a program's source code, usually as long as you retain the copyright notice.

Both approaches have their merits. The GPL is designed to encourage the continual development of free software by preventing people from poaching the free work of others without giving back, and it's perfectly sensible that people who write free software would want to license their work in this way. The GPL isn't designed to be 'popular,' it's primarily geared to serving communities of free software developers. It doesn't necessarily work for game developers who want to make money out of their work without the risk that others will 'steal', modify, and redistribute their work. There aren't too many commercial games available as native Linux applications (not because Linux applications are actually required to be released in source form, but more because the source code form is often required for compatibility reasons, in order to recompile packages for different Linux distributions. Android apps aren't native Linux applications as they run through a virtual machine that sits on top of the system stack).

The BSD license is designed to encourage people to use something however they wish, without any of the compliance hassles or limitations of the GPL. Members of various BSD developer communities, notably OpenBSD, have even taken the drastic step of re-writing freely available GPL-licensed utilities from scratch, to free them of the restrictions imposed by the GPL. It's meant to be a more pragmatic and popular approach, allowing developers free reign to do what they want without drowning in licensing clauses. The obvious question then, is why BSD developer and user communities have remained relatively small, despite the enormous benefits they have brought to companies like Apple.