Chris Blizzard has been involved in the open source software community for over a decade. He has worked extensively on Mozilla’s Firefox browser from the time it was open sourced by Netscape in 1998. He then joined Red Hat in 1999 because he “thought it was going to be interesting”. At Red Hat he has been in a number of roles - initially building its next generation of support tools, then in its desktop group supporting and promoting its web browser solutions through to today’s effort where he has worked on the customised operating system and Sugar User Interface for the One Laptop per Child project.

Before he arrives in Australia for linux.conf.au in January, Blizzard took some time out to share some thoughts with Howard Dahdah.

You are working on making children’s lives better through technology. Tell us how you personally, and Red Hat, got involved in the OLPC project.

I think that answering that requires a bit of background. One Laptop per Child, as I’m sure you know, is a humanitarian effort. It’s not a business and I don’t think that they went out of their way to just build laptops — it’s just that no one was building laptops that could reach that huge underserved part of the world.

Red Hat as an organization participates in humanitarian efforts when we have the chance, but we’re not the largest company in the world. We’re not a multi-billion dollar company that has the resources to rebuild a city or buy vaccines for the children of an continent. Instead we have to pick and choose the places where we can have the most impact. One Laptop per Child is a place where Red Hat’s unique engineering talent -being the largest and most successful open source company to date - can be mixed with our willingness to have a positive impact in the world. Our core competency can be used to positively affect the lives of millions of children all over the world. How many companies get the chance to say that? Or, for that matter, individuals?

My personal story isn’t as grand or as interesting. My good friend Jonathan Blandford and I were running the desktop group inside of Red Hat. My skill set, ability to communicate and collaborate, long history of working with open source communities and being a part of building successful organizations made me a good fit to lead the efforts for Red Hat in this endeavor.

OLPC uses a cut-down version of the Fedora core. Can you tell us what you have done to that core and what your aim is for the final OS?

We’re using Fedora Core 6 as a base for our operating system for the moment. We might move to Fedora 7 when it comes out because it’s going to include a lot of things that we’re going to need: faster startup time, better init scripts, updated libraries and the support of the community as a whole. In fact, a lot of what we’re going to be doing in One Laptop per Child will hugely benefit Fedora 7 when it’s released. As an example, we’ve already seen some changes in yum (an rpm-based update tool for Fedora) that should double its performance as a result of testing it on this platform.

What we’ve had to do is to pare down a lot of the packages that aren’t really required. We don’t need support for RAID, we build our own slimmed down kernel, we don’t include a lot of random server-related utilities, etc. From there we’ve been able to build back up into something that will look like a true desktop instead of just putting a desktop environment on top of something that still at heart acts like a server. What we end up with should be pretty interesting, and I hope will lay down the model for a large number of other Fedora-based derivatives down the road.

You have been working on the Sugar UI for the OLPC. Can you give us a brief rundown on what you have done with it from the start till today?

I have to first say that I am only part of a team that has worked on the UI. A lot of the original ideas come from Seth Nickell, who will probably kill me for using his name, and Bryan Clark. Both of them did a huge amount of thinking and design work back in 2004-2005 along with Havoc Pennington to ask the question: if you were to design a client experience with a particular audience in mind, what would it look like? A lot of the ideas that came out of that are in our UI.

Walter Bender, who is the President of OLPC, along with an excellent design firm out of New York called Pentagram, and Marco Gritti, one of Red Hat’s engineers, also contributed heavily to the design. The zoom metaphor, the idea of the frame and the models for how to represent mesh networks came out of sessions with those folks. This has been a collaborative effort.

That being said, we’ve gotten a good bit done in the short time frame we’ve had to work on it. The frame basics are working reasonably well and you can launch and navigate through activities. The mesh view, the friends view and the activity view are working, but not yet quite up to production quality. We’ve got a few sample activities to work from, including a Web browser (based on Gecko, the underlying engine in Firefox) a music player, an RSS reader, and the eToys environment.

But we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. The journal, which is one of the most critical and interesting pieces of the environment that replaces the desktop, files and folders metaphor, has just now been started. We should hope to see that up and running in its most basic form over the next month or so.

Performance is our largest problem right now. There’s a lot of low hanging fruit that we need to go work on. Over the next couple of months that will be near the top of our agenda. Boot performance is slow, individual activities take too long to start up and there are parts of various activities that are too slow. But we know where some of those issues are and we’ll be making progress along with the rest of the open source community to solve them.

Largely because kids - especially young ones - learn from each other as much as they learn from a teacher. If you let kids show each other interesting things, let them share and work together you’ll end up with an effect that makes teachers more effective and lets kids start to educate each other.

There’s also another reason: because we can. Ever try to share a file from one machine to another? From a Mac to a Windows machine? Why is it so hard? I assert that one of the reasons is because the file metaphor came before we had widespread wireless networking, especially portable wireless and we’re spending a huge amount of time trying to wedge the old model into our new model for networking.

If we take a step back and think about how we can enable this new kind of sharing and collaboration with people you see sometimes, but not always, you can see how you could approach the artifacts you have on your system and how you should be able to share them with other people. We have the chance to do something different here, so we should.

You have talked about the OLPC being able to allow kids to express themselves. And kids express themselves in various ways. How do you go about creating a platform that allows for a sense of expression and lets kids do what they want to do?

Expression requires a platform. As the old saying goes, we have freedom of speech, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have the freedom to say what you want everywhere you want. The fact that the interface we are building allows for creative expression and makes it so easy to give the artifact to someone else so easily means that it encourages expression.

To borrow another metaphor, think of Youtube and MySpace. Places to hang out, but their most important attribute is — at least I believe — that they allow anyone to express, anyone to have fun and to share it with other people. And as easy as those are to use, I believe we’re trying to take this to the next level in this interface.

The Sugar User Interface has copped some criticism. Earlier this month Thom Holwerda said the OLPC team “is creating a whole new paradigm for their laptop’s interface, and this brings with it various difficulties, even though there is absolutely no need for this.” While Harry Brignull said: “Creativity is of course very important, but it has to be tempered within the requirements of the target audience.” How do you respond?

When I hear things like that I tend to taste a particular thought that echoes through the words: that what’s good enough for me is good enough for the kids.

Of course we could have just gone with our current overlapping windows and desktop metaphor with drop down menus and lots and lots of text. In fact, that was our original plan. But our target audience made us think: ‘what can we do that’s better?’ We have to put this in the hands of kids who have never seen a computer before, they don’t have power at home or technical support close at hand. What can we do to make these computers fun and useful and not need a huge amount of help with them? For us, it’s not about doing something that’s different, it’s about finding a way and experience that’s better.

Just for the record, I think the assertion that this is revolutionary is both true and false. We’re making some hard choices around how programs interact with the underlying user interface, how they interact with the network and the computers around them and where they leave artifacts they create, but at the same time we’re still using a lot of elements we find in interfaces today. Tabs, sliders, graphical icons, the mouse, etc — those things all exist and work as expected. We’re leveraging a huge amount of previous work. I would expect the amount of new code that we’re generating as part of this project to add up to 5 per cent of the code found on the machine. It’s just 5 per cent that counts.

I feel like we’re being accused of some kind of high arrogance, and I shudder at that thought. What we’re engaged in here is a creative experiment, one that I hope results in something that’s easy to use for newcomers, allows for growth and encourages sharing and expression and solves a large number of the technical problems that are unique to this machine. We’re certainly not perfect and will learn as we go, but at the same time we feel we’re certainly headed in the right direction.

Part of it is pure customization. We’re pretty committed to open source and free software and that’s one of the things we get out of that commitment. If you have 1 per cent of a million kids that figure out how to hack something neat into the machine, and there’s a mechanism for making that available to others, what does that mean? That’s a huge amount of creative power — something that affects the personality of the machine over time.

I know as a person that I will not always have the right answer to every question and I will not always have the coolest idea in the room. Once again, to assume so would be simple arrogance. What I can do is try to create an environment that encourages those who do have those great ideas a place and mechanism to share them. If it’s possible to roll that into the OS that’s on the machine and you’re able to share that with other people — even other kids, isn’t that a true free market? One in which great ideas find their place and get used?

That’s a really roundabout way to answer your question, of course. The reality is that the mechanisms are well known. A system that allows for extensibility. A place for people to post their changes. A commitment to open code and open processes. A place to share your creations and put them on display to the world. Each of these parts is either part of our current system or is under development.

The OLPC has very strict constraints, namely in the amount of memory on board. How difficult has it been to develop something with so many financial and technological challenges?

First, a note about the constraints themselves. What we’ve actually discovered is that we’re not particularly memory constrained or space-constrained on the disc. You can do a Linux that fits in a couple hundred megabytes of storage and has a huge number of compelling features. We have found that a lot of applications end up being CPU-bound, though. Some of that will be optimization, but some it will be saying, ’sorry, you can’t play that HDTV video on the laptop.’

But it’s also incredibly liberating. I don’t have to worry about how kinds can make their own PowerPoint presentations, because we’re never going to support OpenOffice. I don’t have to worry about how to integrate random huge applications with the desktop, or how we’re going to shrink the file manager because those things aren’t going to fit. It’s like being forced to move to a smaller apartment and you suddenly discover that most of the crap you have in your current place you didn’t need anyway.

There’s also something important to consider. We only have to support a single platform. We spend a huge amount of time in the open source world figuring out how to make code and interfaces that support everyone all the time. This means we’re constrained to the machine that has the fewer options and we waste a huge amount of time thinking about the case where some option isn’t available on the machine. We don’t have to do that here. We can assume it has a camera, we know exactly what libraries are on the base machine and we know exactly what the performance characteristics are and we know exactly who will be using it — kids! So it’s been incredibly empowering, even with the technical constraints.

It’s been great. And its makes me realize that it’s not about the technology, it really is about how you use it. I’m not trying to be flippant there, I think it’s really true. Open source as an idea and an implementation is great, but it really shines when it finds the right context.

You are tapping potentially half the world’s population that hasn’t got access to the Internet, or power. Are you aware of the potential significance of this project?

Yeah. I live in two states: enjoying the promise of the possibility and sheer terror. Mostly I just feel lucky to have the chance to have a positive impact on the world.

The laptops will have built-in modems for Internet connectivity. But the lack of Internet is an issue in certain areas where the laptop will be sold. I have heard that there are plans to utilize train lines to provide connectivity, and there is talk about solar powered access points. Can you tells us exactly what some of the plans are?

I haven’t heard of the trains idea - that must be a new one. Connectivity is an important part of our story and we’re constantly investigating options for various countries. From looking at a Euro 100 access point/server for schools, to satellite, to working with telecoms in the various countries we think that we can get the cost down to something reasonable. The simple fact is that you can’t use one method in every country because they are all different. So each story is going to be different.

But we also know that the machines won’t always have access to the internet, which is why we’re trying to make them fun and useful in small groups and by themselves.

You are a first generation Linux user and have been using it since 1994. Recently you talked about the sense of community and the sense of ’social’ that goes along with Linux and open source technology. What do you mean? And why is it important to you?

I made the argument at one point that what we have is a side effect of a social interaction around people who care about technology. That those that are passionate and interested will eventually start creating things together. My idea is that it’s not as much about the technology as it is about the people.

And why is it important to me? Passionate people create interesting things. They think differently and they are those who are most likely to change the world for the better.

You have some hard-line views on the importance of software freedom. Why?

I wouldn’t say that I have hard-line views. That would seem to indicate that I look down at people who use different tools. I’m certainly committed to using those tools myself, partially because I’m comfortable with them and partially because I think it’s a better way to work. But I think everyone should choose what is best for them.

I have a lot of friends who have started using Macs because they work well. I’m still using Linux on a Mac that I carry with me because I think that in some ways the journey can be more important than the end result.

What will your main message be to attendees at linux.conf.au?

I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently and I’m still not sure where it’s going to go. I suspect some mix of design vs. practicality, how we can compete better in free software vs Microsoft and Apple, and what it takes to do something that’s truly interesting. It’s coming up with good illustrative examples that’s hard. I guess people should just come and see!

Chris Blizzard will keynote on Tuesday, January 16, 2007 and will follow this up with a Sugar tutorial on January 18. For more information, go to http://lca2007.linux.org.au/