July 13th, 2009

Quick thoughts on the (possible) demise of OpenSolaris

Posted by Joe Brockmeier @ 2:50 pm

Categories: Business and Open Source

Tags: OpenSolaris, Oracle Corp., Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, Linux, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software, Joe Brockmeier

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes that the “writing is on the wall. OpenSolaris is on its way out.” Is it really? And what does that mean for the FOSS landscape?

It makes more sense for Oracle to fully embrace Linux. A well-organized transition from Solaris/OpenSolaris to Linux — where Oracle redeploys the Solaris folks to working on Linux and trying to merge some of the better features of Solaris into Linux, would be a fantastic boon for the FOSS community.

That’s not what Vaughan-Nichols is predicting, though:

I can’t imagine that Oracle will announce that it’s actually killing OpenSolaris off. What I’m very much afraid I see happening is that Oracle is going to let OpenSolaris-and other non-core to Oracle Sun projects like MySQL and VirtualBox — wither and die on the vine without corporate support. Their staffers will be either reassigned or laid-off.

I really, really hope I’m wrong. I know a lot of people in these departments, and while we haven’t always seen eye to eye, I think they’re some of Sun’s best and brightest people. Unfortunately, in this economy, simply being great at your job is often no longer enough to draw a paycheck.

I hope he’s wrong too. I don’t agree that all of the non-core projects would “die on the vine,” — VirtualBox and MySQL could be carried by the community, even if Oracle decides to leave those projects completely. In general, I have very mixed feelings about OpenSolaris.

But, the project and the people working on it deserve more respect than for it to “die on the vine,” without Oracle declaring its intent. The community deserves a roadmap. If the community that Sun has built up is willing to carry the project, Oracle owes them at least the benefit of a smooth transition.

Further, if Oracle won’t communicate clearly on its plans regarding FOSS projects under its control, it undermines its efforts in other projects. Surely Oracle is wiser than this, and would (if it decides to withdraw from OpenSolaris) put some effort into addressing the OpenSolaris community and letting them pick up the pieces.

May 31st, 2009

Microsoft sneaks in Firefox extension via Update

Posted by Joe Brockmeier @ 6:42 pm

Categories: Business and Open Source, security

Tags: Firefox Extension, Microsoft Corp., Security Update, Extension, Krebs, Security Administration, Patches, Microsoft Windows, Linux, Web Browsers

The good news is that Microsoft is writing extensions for Firefox. The bad news is, the Redmond giant is slipping the extension onto systems without notifying users and making it difficult to get rid of the extension. Even worse? It’s an extension that allows Web sites to install software onto users’ PCs behind the scenes — meaning that Firefox users on Windows may not be as safe as they think.

Brian Krebs, who originally recommended the .Net Framework that sneaks the extension into Firefox writes:

Anyway, I’m sure it’s not the end of the world, but it’s probably infuriating to many readers nonetheless. Firstly — to my readers — I apologize for overlooking this…”feature” of the .NET Framework security update. Secondly — to Microsoft — this is a great example of how not to convince people to trust your security updates.

Krebs is right: It’s not the end of the world. But it seems like a violation of user trust to monkey with a third-party program — and top it off by making it difficult to remove the extension without editing the Windows Registry. By using the update mechanism to sneak software onto the system, Microsoft is telling security conscious users to be suspicious of updates and to deploy them only after they’ve been widely vetted, or choose a more trustworthy vendor.

As a Linux user, it makes little difference to me what Microsoft does via Windows Update –users on openSUSE and other Linux distros can see exactly what updates will do to their system: Down to the source code, if they choose to take the time.

But, failing a source code audit, Microsoft could at least provide a full disclosure of the packages and features modified when a user runs Windows Update. Without that, users should be wary indeed of trusting Microsoft’s updates — and missing a trust relationship for security updates, users should be wary of running Windows in the first place.

April 24th, 2009

The argument for free fonts

Posted by Joe Brockmeier @ 6:06 am

Categories: Business and Open Source, Licensing

Tags: Font, Pilgrim, Web Font, openSUSE Community, Joe Brockmeier

Bring up free fonts around typeface designers, and you’ll probably get an earful about the relative quality of free and open source designs against the professionally designed fonts. Mark Pilgrim, over on Dive into Mark gives an earful back.

The context here is a discussion of using dynamic Web fonts (a typeface, to be more accurate) in site design, where the publishers are insisting that applications (like the Web browser you’re using right now) be upgraded to allow for a permission table that can allow (or deny) you to use a specific font.

Back to the quality issue. When you bring up open source fonts, professional designers will tell you how horrible they are, how they’re not well-designed, they lack full support for all characters, etc. Much of this, unfortunately, is true. Pilgrim concedes the quality issue, but points out the major disadvantage to professionally designed (and proprietary) fonts — because of licensing, we can’t use them.

Dynamic web fonts are coming. Actually they’re already here, but most of Our People haven’t noticed yet. But they will, and that’s going to be a huge boon to somebody. I see you’ve decided that it won’t be you. Well, have fun shuffling your little bits of metal around. The rest of us will be over here, using the only fonts we’re allowed to use: Everything But Yours.

Pilgrim gets a wee bit worked up about this, but he’s right: Proprietary fonts are a problem for designers as well as free software projects.

The openSUSE community has run into this on several fronts. We used to ship Agfa fonts with openSUSE, but they had a restrictive license and had to go out the door when we reworked our distribution license. Instead, we’re using the Liberation fonts now for openSUSE.

Our “official” font for marketing materials and the like is Cholla, but that’s a proprietary font as well — meaning that if we want the community to be able to create artwork to promote the project, they have to have a copy of Cholla or they won’t be able to replicate the “official” look and feel. (Which is why Jakub Steiner started the Fifth Leg font, which is meant to be a drop-in replacement at some point for Cholla.)

It’s a roadblock, but one the community will eventually work around. As Pilgrim says, “Well, have fun shuffling your little bits of metal around. The rest of us will be over here, using the only fonts we’re allowed to use: Everything But Yours.”

April 20th, 2009

What does Oracle mean for Sun's open source efforts?

Posted by Joe Brockmeier @ 7:01 am

Categories: Business and Open Source

Tags: Oracle Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., Ellison, Open Source, Joe Brockmeier

So much for a big blue Sun. Instead, the company is being gobbled up Oracle for about $7.4 billion. Does this mean that Oracle will become “the biggest contributor to open source,” or a gaping hole in the FOSS ecosystem?

Sun often likes to brag that it’s the largest contributor to open source — and not without some justification. The company does participate in a lot of projects, and with OpenOffice.org, MySQL, and Java, controls some pretty hefty pieces of the open source ecosystem.

Ellison has already announced Oracle’s intention to be “the only company that can engineer an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves.” But the statement doesn’t say diddly about Oracle’s intentions towards Sun’s open source holdings. It also mentions Solaris, but doesn’t say anything about OpenSolaris. It’s certainly understandable that MySQL users would be nervous about the news.

When IBM was courting Sun, there was a reasonable amount of optimism that it would be a good steward of Sun’s open source efforts. Oracle seems like more of an unknown quantity. Oracle isn’t hostile towards open source, but Oracle’s participation in FOSS is very strategic (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and narrowly focused to Oracle’s interests, and certainly much quieter than IBM’s. Oracle’s statement has a one-sentence statement regarding its commitment to Linux, and nothing regarding the future of Oracle’s open source projects, but nothing regarding its plans for pursuing (or not) open source strategies around Sun’s existing projects.

Sun has been trying to build community around its various initiatives, but Oracle doesn’t have a history here at all. Will it simply pick up where Sun left off? If Oracle’s history is any indication, it’s not big on preserving the culture of companies that it’s snarfed up. Will Sun be any different?

For the near future, at least, I expect things to remain status quo. In the long term, though, it will be interesting to see if Oracle takes over community building where Sun leaves off, or if Oracle allows the communities to wither. While Oracle hasn’t snuffed BerkeleyDB as a FOSS project, for example, it hasn’t been nearly as visible as it was when Sleepycat was pushing BerkeleyDB.

From a business standpoint, I think IBM will regret letting Sun slip through its fingers. From an open source standpoint, the community may regret IBM’s letting Sun slip through its fingers.

April 16th, 2009

Yet another "Mac vs. PC" article that misses the point

Posted by Joe Brockmeier @ 11:24 am

Categories: Business and Open Source

Tags: Apple Macintosh, PC, Apple Inc., Desktops, Sales Strategy, Processors, Hardware, Sales, Semiconductors, Components

BusinessWeek has yet another article on the relative costs of Macs vs. PCs, and author Arik Hesseldahl comes down on the Mac side:

PC makers in the Windows camp have done everything possible to make their products progressively worse by cutting corners to save pennies per unit and boost sales volume. There’s good reason Apple is seeing healthy profits while grabbing market share. It refuses to budge on quality and so charges a higher price.

Actually, Apple is losing market share (slightly). According to Gartner, anyway, Apple had negative growth in the first quarter and dropped very slightly (0.1%) in market share.

Apple edges out a lot of users with their limited, and yes overpriced, selection. When I look at Apple’s offerings, I don’t see anything that fits my needs. I want a basic machine that I can stuff a lot of memory and disk in. Note that I said “that I can…” — not an Apple reseller.

The only offering Apple gives users that really fits the bill for my use case is a Xeon-based monster that starts at $2,500. The thing is, I don’t want or need a Xeon. Well, OK, I kind of want one, but I don’t need one. Apps aren’t bottlenecked at the CPU, in most cases. The extra CPU isn’t what I want, it’s RAM, and gobs of it. And disk space for VMs and such. A Core 2 Duo would do just fine.

Lucky for me, I can get what I want with generic PC hardware and Linux. With Apple, you’re constrained to its 16 offerings and some overpriced customizations.

That’s just one example, of course, but Apple’s offerings are generally high-priced for the hardware offered and make no concessions for users who don’t fit their use cases.The point that Hesseldahl and others miss is that the PC market offers way more choice than Apple, even if some of those choices are bargain basement hardware.

Lauren may be a Microsoft shill, but it doesn’t mean that Macs are reasonably priced or vastly better than other systems by any stretch of the imagination.

April 15th, 2009

Google releases source for Google Update

Posted by Joe Brockmeier @ 2:35 pm

Categories: Business and Open Source

Tags: Software, Google Inc., Omaha, Development Team, Tools & Techniques, Open Source, Management, Joe Brockmeier

Word came down from the Google-plex last Friday that the company has decided to release the source code for Google Update. Codenamed Omaha, Update is a software installer that automatically updates Google Earth, Chrome, and other Google-produced apps designed to run on Windows. The development team says they decided to release Omaha under the Apache 2.0 license in the interest of true transparency and because they “know that keeping software up to date is hard.”

Hard is relative, of course. Updating software is a hard problem, but it’s been more or less solved for years on Linux. The software that comes from your vendor or project repositories can be updated without headaches using tools like Zypper, Apt, or Yum without any real fuss.

Granted, a big part of this is due to open source: openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, and the rest of the distros can provide a central repository for the software that makes up the distribution because it is open source. Windows users have to get their software from too many sources to make it viable for a centralized updater.

But, I digress. It is cool to see Google releasing this as open source for other vendors and projects that might benefit from it.

It’s important to note that the code is for Google Update, not Google Updater, which is part of Pack. Apparently Google is aware the names are causing a bit of confusion and they’re working on clarifying the issue. “One idea would be for Google to provide a list of what Google client software gets updates using Google Update,” writes Google software engineer Sorin Jianu.

Opening Omaha’s code benefits developers who are trying to create their own auto-updaters, and also draws on the collective wisdom of the open source community to drive further development. As blogger Alex Russell points out, it may have at least one other consequence. “It’s huge for the Omaha team to be out in the open, particularly given how many inaccurate articles have been penned about the update system. Now you, dear user and/or journalist, can know exactly what the update system is doing all the time. It’s all right there in the code.”

If you want to dig in to Omaha’s source code and help build it, you’ll find detailed instructions in the Developer Startup Guide. If you just want to poke around a bit without downloading anything, you can check it out right online.

Or, you know, you could run one of the many flavors of Linux and enjoy really robust package updates for almost all your apps.

April 10th, 2009

Savory hacks the Kindle for ePub and PDF support

Posted by Joe Brockmeier @ 9:51 pm

Categories: Business and Open Source

Tags: Adobe PDF, Amazon.com Inc., Jesse Vincent, Vincent, E-mail, Online Communications, Joe Brockmeier

Jesse Vincent is doing Amazon’s work for it. Vincent has put together an app called Savory that runs natively on the Kindle to convert ePub and PDFs dropped into the Kindle 2 document folder. If you’re feeling adventurous enough to hack your Kindle, you can read PDFs and ePub documents on the Kindle without having to hassle with Amazon’s ridiculous email conversion process.

Actually, Vincent isn’t the first to hack the Kindle. He uses toolsets created by others to load software onto the Kindle, but wrote a package to do the conversion on the device:

What I did was to port an ebook-conversion package to run reasonably efficiently on a 500mhz ARM with 128 megabytes of system memory and to write a small program which watches for new ebooks in a few chosen formats and run those through the conversion tool.

He released the first version on April 3rd, and has since added support for “picture perfect” conversion of PDFs to the Kindle. The screenshots look very sweet indeed.

Unfortunately, Savory doesn’t run on the original Kindle, so those of us with the original device are out in the cold (or out a few hundred bucks…). But, it’s interesting to see people adding functionality to the device that Amazon doesn’t include natively.

It’s a shame that Amazon doesn’t make this easier, though. If Amazon made it easier to develop add-ons for the Kindle, there’d probably be a lot more useful software for the Kindle — and probably quite a few more devices sold.

March 18th, 2009

What happens for Linux if IBM does buy Sun?

Posted by Joe Brockmeier @ 5:43 am

Categories: Business and Open Source

Tags: OpenSolaris, Sun Microsystems Inc., IBM Corp., Linux, UNIX, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software, Joe Brockmeier

Rumor has it, IBM is looking at buying Sun. No surprise that we’re seeing consolidation in a down market, but will this mean consolidation in the open source space?

I’ll let others speculate on the affect it might have on the hardware market, but I’m curious what would happen to the open source operating system ecosystem. Would IBM keep trying to build a separate OpenSolaris community, or put all the weight behind Linux?

The two communities can (and do) exist side-by-side, and Sun’s contributions to FOSS projects like GNOME benefit the entire FOSS ecosystem - not just OpenSolaris. Sun doesn’t have the same conflict of interest that IBM would, though.

Would IBM continue to support Linux if it had a second open source operating system to look after? In trying economic times, one has to wonder. IBM has been a staunch supporter of Linux, but the company has also dabbled in OpenSolaris, and still maintains AIX. From the corporate viewpoint, it might seem to make more sense to back either Linux or OpenSolaris, rather than maintaining AIX, OpenSolaris, and putting support into Linux as well.

Linux and OpenSolaris are both free *nix operating systems, so why does it matter if IBM goes the OpenSolaris route? It comes down to control: No single vendor controls Linux’s destiny. Red Hat, Novell, Canonical and all of the other vendors participating in Linux development have limited control over development, and their customers have plenty of options.

Even the Linux Foundation is merely a steward for some of the community’s resources, and doesn’t control the direction of the kernel or the larger software ecosystem that make up Linux distros.

Customers have their choice of Linux vendors, contributors have their choice of projects to contribute to. That’s not really true of OpenSolaris. For Solaris/OpenSolaris, there’s really only one game in town. True, a few OpenSolaris derivatives have popped up, but none have the resources of a major company or large project behind them. Backing OpenSolaris means putting a lot of trust in the company behind it. True, the community or a competitor could fork OpenSolaris, but bootstrapping that sort of thing would take time and a lot of effort.

And for IBM, OpenSolaris would require a lot more manpower in the long run. It seems that it would make more sense for Big Blue to provide a migration path for Solaris customers to Linux.

It’s all speculation right now, but if the deal goes through, I hope IBM signals its intentions early on.

March 3rd, 2009

Linux.com goes to Linux Foundation

Posted by Joe Brockmeier @ 5:25 pm

Categories: Business and Open Source

Tags: VA Software Corp., Linux.com, Linux Foundation, LF Folk, Linux, Open Source, UNIX, Operating Systems, Software, Joe Brockmeier

After a decade with VA Linux Systems OSDN Sourceforge.net, Linux.com has come full circle. The news broke today that Linux.com is being transferred to the Linux Foundation, which says it will make Linux.com a “community resource… for the community, by the community.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s because VA Linux Systems promised to do pretty much the same thing back in 1999 when it launched the site.

Linux.com has gone through a lot of changes (editorial and design-wise) since it was sold to VA in 1999, but never quite lived up to its potential. The volunteer-run iteration of Linux.com eventually gave way to paid staff (disclaimer: I worked for Linux.com for two years between 2005 and 2007), but always fell short of being the “community portal” VA promised when it bought the site in 1999.

That doesn’t mean it can’t be done, though, and it certainly needs to be done. The domain could be a useful tool for promoting Linux, if done right. Even without any promotion, Linux.com drew thousands of page views per day in 1999 — and is likely the first destination for users who’ve just heard of Linux.

And it needs to be done by a non-partisan organization, with a mission to promote Linux. The Linux Foundation seems like the logical choice here. It has a fair amount of experience in bringing the community together on projects, and focusing on the site as a focal point for the community is likely to produce better results than focusing on Linux.com as an advertising property first and foremost.

Have an idea what should be on the site? The LF folks are all ears. They’ve set up an IdeaForge page to collect thoughts on what Linux.com should be. What’s your suggestion?

February 22nd, 2009

Addressing software freedom in cloud computing

Posted by Joe Brockmeier @ 11:39 pm

Categories: Business and Open Source

Tags: Software, Software-as-a-service, Richard Stallman, Software Freedom, Tools & Techniques, Software As A Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Managed Hosting, Management, Emerging Technologies

Is the freedom torch passing from Richard Stallman to the next generation? Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy opened the Southern California Linux Expo this year with a keynote about software as a service and user freedoms.

Richard Stallman, a man who has done much in the way of heavy lifting for software freedom, is taking a pass on the issue of software freedom with software as a service. Calling cloud computing “worse than hype,” Stallman has basically thrown in the towel on SaaS, presumably with the expectation that users will continue to rely primarily on compute power and services that reside on their computer.

Kuhn, however, is a bit more forward-thinking and says that Stallman’s refusal to address freedom in the cloud “a challenge to the next generation” to take up software freedom in the cloud.

During his keynote on Saturday, Kuhn claimed that the problem of free software on personal computers had largely been solved. Most things users want to do on PCs can be done with free software (modulo some issues with hardware drivers and more specialized software). However, users are increasingly turning to Web-based software that is not only proprietary, it also removes the user’s direct control over their own data.

Then he laid out the issues (if not all the solutions) to providing freedom to users of cloud computing. While personal computing freedom could be solved by code and licenses, it’s going to take more than that to address SaaS.

One component is the Affero GPL, which takes the GPL to the next logical step for SaaS software — requiring hosted providers to provide changes of software to all users of the software, rather than waiting for software to be “distributed” to users.

But that’s not the entire story. Kuhn pointed out that there are the larger problems of data and allowing users to take relationships — essentially community — in addition to code. It’s not enough to get your data out of Facebook or Ning — what about the relationships that exist in the software?

It was a bit disappointing that RMS was so quick to dismiss cloud computing, but it looks like the next generation of freedom fighters is ready to take on the task.