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Google makes Chrome OS open source
Google made the early code available to the open source community and claims external developers will have the same access to the code as internal Google developers.... Continued »
Category: Infrastructure
November 19th, 2009
MindTouch launches its open source cloud
You can argue that clouds are fast becoming synonymous with SaaS, but MindTouch has launched its own cloud to serve up its open source collaboration solution.
MindTouch bills itself as the open source alternative to Sharepoint and recently named our own Matt Asay as the second most-influential executive in open source. (You’re number one in my book, Matt.)
Pricing starts at $7/month, but you can try it free. It allows non-programmers to overlay data from a variety of internal and external resources in a single collaborative environment.
You might consider it an enterprise mashup service akin to Salesforce.com’s Chatter. But while Chatter is focused on social media MindTouch is focused on enterprise data — Chatter is about social and MindTouch about media.
Of course that last may be a comparison of sales pitches, not feature sets. MindTouch is launching its cloud just a week after announcing its Enterprise Dashboard, so these features may just be at the top of its mind right now.
Clouds will bear careful watching in 2010. They not only abstract complexity and virtualize everything, but they also blur the lines of open source and proprietary with a unitary business model based on SaaS. Which means everyone in software competes with everyone, and on the same playing field.
Which would leave me with nothing to write about. Maybe I can finally start that novel.
November 13th, 2009
The stupid network will get a hearing
Advocates of transforming network regulation from Bell services to dumb bits will get a hearing from the FCC, as David Isenberg, author of the classic Rise of the Stupid Network, has joined the agency as an expert advisor.
(Picture taken in 2004 from Isenberg’s Isen.com Web site.)
Isenberg will be part of the team that will deliver the National Broadband Plan to Congress in February. He wrote on his blog that, as a result of his agency assignment his annual conference on broadband reform, Freedom2Connect, will be postponed.
A bit of disclosure. I covered the 2006 Freedom2Connect conference in Washington for ZDNet.
In the Stupid Network essay, which he wrote while at AT&T in 1997, Isenberg argued that the most efficient network is controlled at the edge, with a design based on the idea of plenty rather than scarcity, and transport based on the needs of the data.
The idea, he wrote, was that the network did not need intelligence at the center, that it should just “deliver the bits, stupid.” Hence the stupid network.
The problem is that while the stupid network is fine engineering, great for users and consumer equipment suppliers, it doesn’t leave much for the telephone company to do but move bits. And Isenberg wrote at a time when the bit-moving market was highly competitive, with prices falling every few months.
Thus the phone companies have argued against the stupid network. They have sought to install gear within the parts of the Internet they control to guarantee Quality of Service, to distinguish between bits based on protocol or what the customer is paying to move them, and to stop bad bits before they arrive at a user’s desk.
“Those are nice bits there, a shame if something happened to them.” And the phone company is Santa Claus, deciding which bits are naughty and which are nice.
The problem with this is it slows the network, and creates a barrier to entry for innovation, which must win permission from the network operator in order to reach the market. It is also redundant if customer equipment can handle tasks previously done by the intelligent network.
The Internet, as it exists today, is essentially a stupid network.
Cellular networks, you will note, are completely different from stupid networks. Such networks are all centrally controlled, with the carrier defining different bits as separate services, controlling who can sell what, and taking a cut on every transaction.
Isenberg left AT&T in 1998 as “Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff” but has been better known as mud, Voldemort and Who’s He at Bell offices ever since. (This is especially true for those who work as Bell lobbyists.)
Isenberg will just be one member of the agency’s National Broadband Task Force, one voice out of many. The FCC is also taking public comment online and holding hearings.
But at least his voice will be heard.
November 9th, 2009
Where should Mozilla go from here?
Five years into Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation’s plans seem mainly geared to an aggressive release schedule, so that the browser can compete with Google Chrome.
There is irony here, because the bulk of Mozilla’s income comes from Google, in the form of royalties on the Google search box which sits on the upper-right corner of the program’s interface.
Thus we have a browser created to stop the Microsoft monopoly pushing what some say is the next dangerous monopoly, that of Google.
Firefox is not Mozilla’s only project. There is the Thunderbird e-mail client, the Bugzilla bug tracking system, and SeaMonkey, which combines Firefox and Thunderbird with Web development tools and chat.
But Firefox is what Mozilla is known for, and most of its work, and that of its add-on makers, is devoted to Firefox and the technologies that emerged from it.
Firefox has transformed the Web, by creating real competition to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The question to ask today, however, is where does Mozilla go from here?
- Can Mozilla expand its funding sources to become truly independent of Google?
- Can Mozilla create real market share outside the browser?
- Should Mozilla be focused on browser share, or leave that to Google Chrome and concentrate instead on HTML-related technologies?
- What is Mozilla, in the end? What does the Foundation want to be?
These are the questions born of success. They are not attacks on Mozilla, but the most successful experiment always raises more questions than it answers. Mozilla is, as they say when a soccer team is attacking, “asking the questions.” Which questions should it be asking?
Where, then, does Mozilla go from here? Now that certainties have disappeared, how does its dreams survive? In an open source world, these are not just questions for the Foundation’s directors. They are also questions for you.
November 3rd, 2009
Skype plays footsie with open source
As I wrote earlier today, when something goes open source we should ask how.
So in contrast with Yahoo’s open sourcing of Traffic Server, let’s talk about Skype’s “open source” move.
Yahoo was trying to build value from community. Skype is trying an embrace and extend strategy like that of Blackboard.
To its credit Skype is being frank on that.
Yes, there’s an open source version of Linux client being developed. This will be a part of larger offering, but we can’t tell you much more about that right now. Having an open source UI will help us get adopted in the “multicultural” land of Linux distributions, as well as on other platforms and will speed up further development. We will update you once more details are available.
It’s a half-cheer for open source.
All Skype really plans to open source is a Linux version of its client. The protocol remains proprietary. So if you have a Linux phone (Moblin, Android, etc.) and want to support Skype’s proprietary protocol on your new hardware, you can.
This is the first technology move by Skype since eBay sold it to private investors for $2 billion , followed by assorted legal shenanigans. Everyone involved in that deal wants to protect that value.
But telephony is a low-bandwidth application. Its value going forward shouldn’t be voice as-such, but the integration of voice with other computer applications. In that world being wholly proprietary is a disadvantage. But opening up completely may be seen as giving away the goose that lays golden eggs.
Skype is caught east of the rock and west of the hard place. It knows it needs an open source strategy, but it fears giving itself away.
My view is this is not going to end well.
November 3rd, 2009
Yahoo does right by Traffic Server
It’s easy to become obsessive over whether a piece of code is open source.
How code becomes open source can be just as important. Is it being given the resources and sponsorship necessary to grow? Or is it being tossed over the side of a sinking ship?
By those standards, Yahoo has done its Traffic Server, acquired early this decade along with Inktomi, a solid service, placing the code with Apache.
The code is available right now from Apache’s incubator. This brings the number of incubator projects to 36.
Traffic Server is designed to optimize Web sites by caching popular content at the network edge, closer to users. It’s not something Google needs — they have their own solution — but it could be very useful for relatively new, fast-growing sites. It can keep them from going down when everyone “rushes to the rail” for access.
The software is being released in time for ApacheCon, which plans a Meetup on the software at 8 PST tonight. If you’re at the Con go to Room 4. There you can get the lowdown on features, performance and history from people who have actually written code.
Shelton Shugar of Yahoo told CNET’s Stephen Shankland that Yahoo hopes Traffic Server grows like Hadoop, the cloud computing technology that has since spawned the start-up Cloudera.
What do you think it can be?
November 2nd, 2009
Blackboard embraces and extends into open source movement
Anyone seeking a case study of how a proprietary software company can “embrace and extend” itself into the open source world should stop thinking Microsoft and start thinking Blackboard.
(Picture from the University of Alaska. Bonus points if you find a link to Russia from the site.)
Blackboard has a long-running feud with open source, ably chronicled by our own Christopher Dawson. Open source Learning Management Systems (LMSs) like Moodle, Sakai and OLAT have been seeking its market share for five years now.
Part of the solution was to open source tools for use with its proprietary suite. Blackboard may have been overly-aggressive in pushing this as a true open source solution but it wasn’t finished yet.
Phase Two involves signing alliances with educators and lining up scaled resources from within the open source ecosystem.
Today’s news brings an example.
It’s a deal with Northwestern University (Go Wildcats) to integrate its Blackboard Learn platform within Google Apps as a single sign-on. The Building Block itself is open source, Google Apps is based on open source, but here’s the imprimatur of a major University (and big customer) linking a proprietary LMS into it.
Earlier this year Blackboard signed a deal with Flat World Knowledge, the open source textbook publisher we’ve written of here, to integrate Flat World textbooks with Blackboard Learn.
Given Blackboard’s position as a market leader, and its open source Building Blocks for handling the integration, the move by Flat World is logical and justifiable.
The result, however, is that despite open source a proprietary LMS is more entrenched than ever within its marketplace.
October 26th, 2009
The chief value of open source
One thing I agree with Matt Asay about. The key to open source is not that it’s free.
Open source doesn’t even cut costs, because code licenses represent only a tiny portion of a major product’s cost.
The chief value of open source is visibility. (These highly visible sneakers cost $120 from Xander. Picture from Hypebeast.)
You can see the code, you can test the code, you can improve the code, but mostly you can see the code.
When you see the code vendors, of necessity, change their business models. Their costs move to the back-end. They look for subscription revenue, for services revenue. They look for ways to help a project work.
When you can see the code you have a different relationship with it. You’re no longer asking what it can do. You’re asking how you can adapt it to your needs.
With code visibility, you and your vendors become partners in trying to make something work. The vendor can’t over-promise, but you can’t over-assume either. This may be one of main hidden reasons for IT failure, the two sides of the transaction not being on the same page.
You can also get around a vendor with open source. If the vendor doesn’t have time to fix your issue, you pay someone else to fix it. Maybe you hire someone, maybe you just go to the community or its commercial arm. There are no more excuses, well no more you have to tolerate, with open source.
When code is visible, and you’re a member of the code community, you’re going to be up-to-date on improvements, enhancements, and bug fixes. It’s not just that the code becomes visible, but you become visible as a user of the code.
It’s true that in the enterprise space there is no such thing as free code. There is only visible code and invisible code. When you have open source you have the visible kind, and this makes all the difference.
October 20th, 2009
Nimsoft takes another step forward in cloud monitoring
Nimsoft, which specializes in monitoring tools for data centers, is entering the cloud market.
CEO Gary Read said that, as of today, all the company’s performance monitors will become available for external environments, meaning they can deal with hosted providers, managed services, SaaS or clouds.
<!– @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } –>
“The computing infrastructure of the future will no longer be hosted internally by the customer, but customers will have a combination of internal and external resources. They’ll want to see the performance and service across that entire environment.”
The initial release will cover the Amazon cloud and Rackspace, but Read said the company is taking measurements on Salesforce.com and has plans to expand to Microsoft and Google cloud offerings.
Read insisted this is not like those “cloud weather reports” we wrote about last year. <!– @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } –>
“You haven’t been able to monitor a single customer’s usage, and you haven’t been able to pull all the different threads, and combine that with an internal environment, into a single integrated view of the service delivery.
That’s the big play. It’s not about one provider. It’s about pulling all the threads together, because everything then becomes part of the same fabric of service delivery.”
Read said that, for cloud vendors, his move and that of his competitors will help in cloud adoption and make clouds common parts of computing infrastructure.
The company will be hosting a Web conference on its site today to discuss the new release and new direction. I wonder if the name “rainbow” is taken?
October 13th, 2009
The original open source niche remains just that
When I first began covering this beat five years ago there was great excitement about one niche, enterprise software.
Large companies would buy support, the thinking went, and open source would save them money. Big money.
Five years later, it’s still a niche.
Consider the good people at Groundwork Open Source. (That’s co-founder and COO Dave Lilly smiling over there, maybe because Peter Jackson replaced him in the CEO hot seat. His corporate picture is much better than the one CNET has.)
Groundwork offers reporters a steady supply of story ideas and leads. They specialize in system management software. They have been around since 2003. They offer many fine resources like MonitoringForge, a community for open source system management problems of all kinds.
Groundwork Open Source is an example of a well-run enterprise open source company. It has good relations with Red Hat, evidenced by its recent switch to JBOSS. It’s also part of the Microsoft System Center Alliance program. At Oracle OpenWorld this week they’re supplying some of the games.
The big news, however, is the closing of a new $5 million round of financing led by Canaan Partners.
Cool. Congratulations. Uh, $5 million?
Please don’t misunderstand. It’s great that Groundwork has this money. A lot of open source companies founded in 2003 are sprouting tombstones, not running tombstone ads.
But $5 million? In venture capital? Six years after launch? When you’re doing everything right? Really? Really.
My point is that there are some zeroes missing in this enterprise open source niche. Previous booms sprouted many more, much faster. This business has already seen a $1 billion deal (mySQL) and a $350 million one (JBOSS). But how many more are out there?
There are other values in open source other than money. I am the first person to say so. But among those for whom money is the chief value, is this an ore vein that’s playing out?
October 5th, 2009
How open source defends itself in the PR wars
At first, opposing candidates were shocked when Web users used the Web to fisk their latest campaign charges, often turning them back on the attacker inside the same news cycle.
They adapted, and eventually companies like Nominem will, too.
I offered snark in reaction to Nominem’s attack on BIND as “legacy freeware”. But it did not take long for the DNS community to offer more:
- Nominem was subject to DNS cache poisoning attacks open source alternatives were not.
- Nominem’s Web server runs on Apache, which is open source.
- Nominem was founded to develop a version of BIND.
Nominem’s PR people did the best they could under the circumstances, but they were Custer at Little Big Horn, surrounded and under constant fire.
Open source attacks tend to be like zombies in that they demand human sacrifices before they go away. The Skye executive who started this kerfluffle, Jon Shalowitz, (above) might want to avoid any open mics for a while.
Next time Jon and his fellow Stanford Business School alums get together for a chat he’ll have a story for them.
September 25th, 2009
Which is more reliable, the client or the cloud
I understand GMail was out again yesterday.
Our Stephen Shankland notes this was the fourth outage of the year.
Education blogger Chris Dawson calls this a game of “unrealistic expectations.” The tweets were all a-Twitter about it, but the big fail whale has been on their screen so much this year that cable news viewers now know what it is.
Online services have brief outages all the time, and it can be funny when it happens. In a store, or at the library, workers stand around helplessly. They have forgotten how to take cash or make change.
But we’re facing a choice, as users, and as a market. We have increasingly bloated clients, and (apparently) unreliable SaaS and cloud networks to serve them.
Which side is going to win?
Having watched technology evolve for nearly 3 decades, I have seen this pattern repeat-and-repeat. We build something, it’s great, so we grow it and it gets bloated. So we go somewhere else and start building that.
It happened with PCs, with LANs, with the Internet, with mobile, and even with open source. Even Linux is now bloated.
So what’s the answer? This does not happen with hardware. Hardware is highly reliable, increasingly so, as it becomes more complex. Anything relying on software, however, is increasingly prone to breakage as it grows.
Knowing this, will you rely on the client or on the cloud?
Loading ...September 23rd, 2009
BIND is not just legacy freeware
In pushing his SaaS DNS offering, Skye, general manager John Shalowitz has his marketing department partying like it’s 1999.
The open source BIND system that has held the Internet together for decades is “freeware,” he sniffs to ZDNet UK’s Toby Wolfe. “Freeware legacy DNS is the Internet’s dirty little secret.”
What’s wrong with that statement? Just about everything. Open source is not just freeware, calling something legacy just means it’s tested, and there has never been anything secret about BIND, dirty or otherwise.
Or as Yosemite Sam told Bugs Bunny in High Diving Hare, “Dem’s fightin’ woids.”
As to Skye, what can we say? We don’t know what’s in it. It’s proprietary. Shalowitz is basically using wordplay to say what proprietary vendors have told the market for ages. “Trust me.”
And when you’re talking about “cloud-based DNS,” you’re basically trusting someone to do a hosted version of every domain name lookup your company may want to do, now or in the future. You not only toss BIND, but all your internal DNS knowledge out the window, renting a service in which you will never get equity.
It all depends on how you look at it.
Skye comes from Nominum, which has been offering proprietary DNS software for years. Nominum knows its business, but it also knows that BIND is not a piece of garbage hacked together by a couple of college students in their dorm room. It’s a tested package with a long pedigree.
BIND is the reference implementation for the DNS protocols, and remains the most widely-used DNS software on the Internet. To call it “legacy”and “freeware” in pushing a proprietary alternative on mid-sized companies is just several steps beyond silly.
Of course the real question remains, will the pitch work?
September 21st, 2009
Will the open Internet become a partisan divide
The idea of an open and neutral Internet is about to become a political flash point.
The launch of a new site dedicated to the issue, OpenInternet.gov (above) was accompanied by FCC chair Julius Genachowski publishing his speech text at The Washington Post and a brief commentary based on it at The Huffington Post, a liberal site.
The regulatory regime he proposed is along the lines of a net neutrality bill offered by Democrats that got a hearing in the House last week. The agency and the House agree on their aims, the main differences being how and where the details will be fleshed out.
Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal, which hosted policy pronouncements from top regulators throughout the Bush Administration, ran a piece about Genachowski’s moves that was highly skeptical of both their rationale and their legality.
It said Republicans will oppose Genachowski on “free enterprise” grounds, and pointed to a suit by Comcast against previous attempts to impose a set of net neutrality rules.
At the same time the two Republican members of the FCC said they opposed any net neutrality for wireless, and support exclusive deals between equipment makers and networks like the AT&T-iPhone deal.
Add a little industry Astroturf and a plan depressingly like that in health care starts to become visible. Turn some insiders with industry money, work from the outside on ideological grounds, and the 2008 election need never have happened. Plus you can blame the Democrats if they fail to crush you — call them partisan and ideological.
My view remains that net neutrality would not be necessary in an environment where there is ample competition. If someone wants an ISP or cell operator that will block everything to the left of Fox News they should have it, so long as the market offers ample alternatives.
Unfortunately antitrust does not appear to be the ground the Obama Administration seems ready to stand on. Which could make the open Internet a partisan divide for years to come.
September 9th, 2009
OpenID biggest government boost yet for open source
In the biggest government boost to open source yet, the U.S. government has endorsed OpenID.
OpenID is a confederated identity system meant to let you enter many sites without worry about passwords. The code libraries needed to implement the system is available under a number of technologies, and a number of different licenses.
The most common license being used now is Apachev2, but there are also implementations under the MIT, BSD, and even the MS-PL licenses. The OpenID site lists the license for SqueakSource as unknown.
The program announced by U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra is a pilot program, which will let citizens with OpenID authentication to use government Web sites.
Chris Messina (pictured from his Web site) wrote the blog post announcing the government move, which includes examples of where it can be useful, as when you want to book a camp ground or save a search at the NIH concerning a loved one’s cancer diagnosis.
“Do you really want to create yet another account (that you’ll probably never use again) just to reserve a campsite? Probably not,” he writes.
Of course, all this means opponents of the current Administration are bound to see OpenID as some sort of “mark of the beast.” But if Bush did it Democrats would feel that way, so you can’t win.
Personally I’d love to have a stable digital identity that did not require me to memorize hundreds of different passwords, and whose implementations were covered by open source licenses. Would you?
September 3rd, 2009
Young man yells at cloud
Blogger-novelist-activist Cory Doctorow is out today with a screed condemning the whole idea of cloud computing.
(Here he is in Wikipedia. Doesn’t that live somewhere in the cloud?)
Here is a summary.
The Man is trying to put us down. It’s all a conspiracy to make us pay for what we could do ourselves for free. The corporate shills want to control our machines and through them, our brains.
I agree with Doctorow on many things. On other things I’m sympathetic.
On this he’s dead wrong.
Running a PC is a hassle. There are software updates, there are anti-virals and anti-spyware and registry cleaners to worry about. It can take five minutes for even a Netbook to boot up, and another five minutes to shut it down.
Hardware is not the issue. Client hardware is an incredible bargain. The issue here is software.
All the problems now endemic to Windows machines are slowly infiltrating the worlds of the Mac and Linux, too. This has to do with the size and complexity of modern operating systems, and the large number of very nasty people working overtime to break them.
Maybe, if you have just one laptop, you can deal with this expense and hassle. But even small companies may now have 10-20 or more PCs running at once. The expenses of managing clients are driving companies to the wall.
The idea of the cloud is to abstract this complexity, take it out of the hands of users and put it in the hands of experts. One set of experts can handle the hassles of thousands of users, and hundreds of companies, for less than those users and companies are paying now.
Or as Mark Twain once said, “Put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket.”
As to the broader market, Mr. Doctorow has one kid, a toddler. Congratulations. I have three PCs, my dear wife runs three, my daughter has two and my son has a desktop for gaming with a terabyte of storage.
We use both wired and wireless networking to keep it all together. Several times a year I lose a day of work scrabbling around on my knees, under a desk, trying to check wiring. I have a repair guy on speed dial. I’m not that unusual, and becoming less so all the time.
The complexity and vulnerability of PCs means you can’t just run one. I always have my Netbook on standby for emergencies. If malware infects me, or the cable goes out, I can be at a local coffee shop within minutes.
I no longer even trust my PC for really important stuff. That goes on a USB stick. You can get a 32 Gigabyte stick these days for about $70. Next week it will be less. Wear it around your neck, plug it into the cloud anywhere and, if everything works right, there you are.
Now Doctorow has valid concerns. Networks are not yet built to handle massive use of clouds. The legal environment for cloud users is, well, cloudy.
Fact is these are early days. In PC time it’s 1978. In Internet time it’s still 1994.
What 30 years of experience tells me is that condemning the future when you don’t know what it looks like is never a wise move.
August 27th, 2009
NHIN code-a-thon may change government attitude toward open source
Tomorrow, the Department of Health and Human Services will host its first “code-a-thon” dedicated to the National Health Information Network and its Connect software.
About 80 programmers, led by Apache developer (and Collabnet employee) Brian Behlendorf, will spend about four hours trying to stamp out bugs in the open source software gateway, which is based on National Health Information Network (NHIN) conventions.
Behlendorf’s presence is not ceremonial, as CollabNet runs the military’s forge.mil open source forge site.
The code-a-thon, and the resulting code, could be a great demonstration of the power of open source in dealing with big problems like health care. The participation of Behlendorf offers hope the open source movement will have a great success.
While open source code has won approval from the Obama Administration, the processes by which such code is developed have not fared as well.
While the Veterans Administration is still working with its open source VistA platform, for instance, it has placed a moratorium on accepting code from local VA facilities. Instead of developing VistA through a network of collaborators, open source IT advocate Fred Trotter writes, “it will be centrally developed by a single, controlling entity.”
The decision may improve security and manageability of the code base, but it’s also going to slow down development, and give one contract holder control of the software.
Whether Behlendorf and his code-a-thon can give U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra a little open source religion may be an open question. As Virginia CTO Chopra outsourced development work to India under a master contract signed with Northrup-Grumman which has since become highly controversial.
Are open source projects that are centrally controlled by single vendors really open source projects, or are they proprietary projects using open source as a feature? That’s a question the Obama Administration needs to answer if it’s to get full value from open source.
August 3rd, 2009
What the FCC can do for open spectrum
Larry Dignan is afraid the FCC may be doing too much, just looking at possibly anti-competitive deals, trying to stay on top of the news instead of sleeping in a corner, as it did for a decade before Julius Genachowski (right) came to town.
It’s a mark of just how knee-jerk the opposition to government action in markets has become, that a mere investigation can lead reporters to fingering their worry beads.
To most people it’s pretty obvious why Apple shut down Google Voice. VOIP is competition with cellular minutes, just as it was competition for wired phone minutes, which it destroyed.
I’m old enough to remember the monthly chore of auditing my phone bill each month, creating expense bills for various publishers, with the cost of each call written down and photocopied. I don’t do that any more. The cost is rolled into my cellular plan as minutes which neither I nor my publisher has to see.
But running phone calls — a low bandwidth service — over the Internet rather than the wireless network is still a cost savings, which some customers would like to capture. Only the cell phone companies don’t want them to.
This is just one of many ways in which companies have succeeded in frustrating Moore’s Law over this decade. There is no technical reason why the price to move bits should not be going down, going down constantly, and going down rapidly. The cost of equipment, the efficiency of technology, it’s all there to make it happen.
What isn’t there are competitive markets with incentives for investment and no tolerance for monopoly.
Politics has squandered the advances of Moore’s Law, and it will take more than the FCC’s meager politics to bring them back.
So let me offer a simple guideline. Call it Dana’s Law of Technology Regulation:
Regulation should conform to the trends of Moore’s Law and maintain maximum competition in the market.
It will take real changes, not just investigations, to make that happen. We need more unlicensed channels, we need wholesaling in the last mile.
Bits may not be free, but they should be as cheap as the technology creating them allows. The goal should be encouraging the market to expand opportunity, and not making anyone’s life easier.
July 30th, 2009
Ending DNS abuse with European open source
A collection of European Internet insiders have announced OpenDNSSEC, a project aimed at managing the security of domain names on the Internet.
The group notes that DNS caches are no longer secure, and a white paper says the automated checks will make the creation of secure zones automatic, combining DNS records and digital signatures.
Sponsors are in Europe include the English registry Nominet, NLnet Labs of the Netherlands, the Internet Infrastructure Foundation .SE in Sweden, the Swedish Kirei AB consultancy, SIDN, which maintains the .NL Netherlands domain, and SURFnet, which handles the same country’s university network, and English DNS consultant John Dickinson.
Secure domain name abuse is one of the main tools hackers have for getting past security systems, and making domains tougher to forge is something that is devoutly to be wished. The announcement of OpenDNSSEC follows an Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Sweden.
The poisoning of DNS cache has become commonplace since Dan Kaminsky demonstrated how the DNS security model is flawed two years ago.
July 15th, 2009
The grand Google plan against the whole Microsoft stack
With its release of a NeatX server, however buggy and primitive it may be, Google has signaled its effort to go after the entire Microsoft software stack.
Critics may call this more of a Grand Guignol plan, a horror show meant only to immunize both Google and Microsoft from antitrust scrutiny, but it’s a mistake to confuse investment size and intent. In the end Grand Guignol was only a puppet theater.
This looks as serious as a heart attack
With NeatX in the enterprise, Chrome OS on the desktop and Android in the hand, Google is challenging the whole relationship between client and server, offering what might be called a client and cloud paradigm.
As Google’s blog notes, NeatX is an X Window implementation originally created by No Machine of Italy under the GPL in 2003. The No Machine business model included a proprietary server. NeatX is an open source alternative, also offered under GPL V2.
In a client-server environment, PCs on the desk are networked to servers in the back office. The server manages the clients, but it’s still pretty complex and expensive.
In the client-cloud paradigm, all complexity is stripped-out and the server work is farmed-out to the cloud. It costs less, a lot less, but is it secure and reliable? Would you trust your business to it? How about your life? Your privacy?
This is the question Google must answer, at all levels of its stack. Functions must be balanced, between what’s on your desk, your lap, or in your hand, and what’s synced to the cloud. The cloud must also provide a host of software and services we presently assume will remain totally under our personal control. That control must be guaranteed.
There is much to be done, but even at the start the vision seems clear.
June 24th, 2009
Reductive to service Puppet open source configman tools
Key founders of Puppet have incorporated and received $2 million in venture capital funding to advance the open source configuration management software project.
Reductive Labs, which has evolved from the same named consulting firm founded in 2003, will provide training, service and support for Puppet, the next generation open source infrastructure automation framework which is reportedly gaining strength and numbers of users.
Reductive has formed partnerships with Red Hat, Fedora and Canonical and has about 20 paying customers. Puppet currently supports Linux, Unix and Macintosh environments.
Puppet, which was first made available under the GPL in 2005, is a configuration management framework that enables customers to write policies about how web servers should be configured, how database servers should be configured and how mail servers should be configured,” said Andrew Shafer, chief strategy officer for Reductive Labs, which will be headquartered in Portland, Oregon. “Puppet lets you write policies, enforce them and automate them on an ongoing basis and operating system installation through patches and upgrades.”
Shafer said it’s important to have a robust policy-based configuration framework that can significantly speed up deployment of corporate servers. He noted that policy-based tools are valuable because few servers are configured in the exact same way in any corporation.
He pointed out that configuration management becomes even more critical as virtualization and cloud computing take off.
“With virtualization, your hardware headache eases but with thousands of virtual machines you’ve multiplied your configuration management complexities,” said Shafer. “People are bringing up thousands of [virtual] machines with EC2 [cloud] and configuration management complexity is further magnified. Bringing up a test infrastructure or a deployment infrastructure becomes a much easier proposition than trying to manage it in other ways.”
One senior systems engineer at Digg.com was able to rebuild 60 [virtual] machines from scratch in two hours [using Puppet] that would have taken two full days of work if done manually. “And I was largely a spectator,” said that engineer, Paul Lathrop, of Digg. “Now that’s automation.”
“And if he needed to build 600 machines, it wouldn’t have taken much longer,” because of the policy-based configuration management approach, Shafer said.
Its biggest competitor is amorphous: thousands of unique scripts system administrators write for their own environments, Shafer said. There are some model-based configuration management frameworks developed by BMC’s BladeLogic and HP’s Opsware but nothing in the open source space that compares to Puppet, Shafer said.
Reductive has no plans to commercialize the framework into a product per se and will focus exclusively on the services side of the business. Puppet 0.25 is currently in beta testing and represents a huge step forward: three times the speed in one third of the memory footprint of the current 0.24 series.
Paula Rooney is a Boston-based writer who has followed the tech industry for almost two decades. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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