November 4th, 2009

With Zapatec Funambol has one stack to rule mobile open source

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 12:01 am

Categories: Applications, Development, General, Strategy, mergers & acquisitions, wireless

Tags: Mobile, Open Source, App, Zapatec Funambol, Advertising & Promotion, AJAX, Marketing, Internet, Software/Web Development, Web Development

Funambol, now billing itself as the leader in mobile sync, has bought Zapatec, which creates Web 2.0 solutions using AJAX.

The result, the company believes, will be a one-stop shop for building mobile applications that run as well as native apps across multiple platforms.

Funambol has its developers in Italy, Zapatec in the Ukraine, but both have operations in Silicon Valley that will be consolidated in Redwood City. Zapatec CEO Dror Matalon will become vice president of emerging technologies for the combined company, said Funambol vice president of worldwide marketing Hal Steger.

The combined company is focused on a tough problem for mobile developers, namely how do you create apps that integrate with native apps, yet don’t have to be completely rewritten for each platform.

Steger said Funambol’s sync technology solves part of the first problem, Zapatec most of the second, and the combination will enable a total solution.

“A lot of people think the future of mobile apps will be like Web apps, like AJAX apps on desktop browsers,” said Steger. “If you can build a Web app that works on a lot of phones you can just build one version.”

Not exactly. “Mobile is different from desktops because two of the most important things you need to do are integrate with the core apps on the phone, like the address book and calendar, because other apps do.” This makes it harder to build a single app for multiple platforms and carriers.

Funambol solves part of the problem since its mobile sync is designed to be cross-platform and cross-carrier. Zapatec solves the coding problem.

You can call this innovation, but then it’s all based on an open source core. Developers will want to do business with Funambol, not just download its stuff, to get the full effect, Steger said, but the effect should be cool.

November 3rd, 2009

Skype plays footsie with open source

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:05 am

Categories: Applications, Distributions, General, Infrastructure, Internet, VOIP, telecom, wireless

Tags: Skype Technologies S.A., Linux, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software, Dana Blankenhorn

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

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:45 am

Categories: Applications, Cloud Computing, Development, Distributions, Events, General, Infrastructure, Internet

Tags: Yahoo! Inc., Apache Software Foundation, Server, Traffic Server, Cloud Computing, Open Source, Virtualization, Hardware, Dana Blankenhorn

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

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:09 am

Categories: Applications, General, Google, Implementations, Infrastructure, Strategy, business models, content, education, marketing

Tags: Open Source Movement, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

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 14th, 2009

Why Mac open source gets no respect

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:31 am

Categories: Apple, Applications, Development, Distributions, General

Tags: Apple Macintosh, Apple Inc., AppleJack, XBMC Media Center, Fink, Mac People, Open Source, Desktops, Hardware, Dana Blankenhorn

For a system evolved from a BSD Unix the Mac OS does not get much respect from the open source community.

There are Mac-only programs in the open source firmament. AppleJack is a nice troubleshooting assistant. The XBMC media center . has no counterpart in the Windows world. Fink connects the Mac to the Linux open source mainstream.

NOTE: The XBMC folks write to say that there are versions of their software for both Windows and Linux, as well as the Mac.

But most of the popular Mac open source products out there are familiar to Windows users. These include the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox and Thunderbird, Gimp, and the VLC Media Player.

Why hasn’t open source made more of an impact in the Mac universe? Following are some theories. Feel free to add your own, or just heckle:

1. Mac people are users. As opposed to programmers. When your initial bundle is filled with usable software who needs to go into the code?
2. Steve wouldn’t like that.  Apple is not friendly to open source. Their attitude makes the relationship between Microsoft and open source look like a first-class bromance.
3. No critical mass. I don’t mean there aren’t enough Apple users out there, I mean there aren’t enough angry ones. Linux people know they’re on their own, and Microsoft frustration abounds. Are you an angry Mac user? Do you have any other friends?
4. No profit in it. A lot of open source effort is driven by the profit motive. How much money can one make in Apple open source?
5. Apple gets there first. Apple is quite adept at exploiting new niches within its own ecosystem. The capabilities of its operating system are full available in the commercial market.
6. Mac people are upscale. Since Macs generally cost less than PCs, ownership of a Mac shows you are not a penny pincher. This changes the make-or-buy equation, tipping it strongly to buy.
7. You’re not looking hard enough. There’s really a ton of Mac open source out there, but PC-using reporters are too lazy to go look at it.

What would you add to this list?

October 13th, 2009

Wikipedia productized

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 9:20 am

Categories: Applications, General, Hardware, business models, content, marketing, mass market, publishing

Tags: Encyclopedia, Wikipedia, Wiki, Online Communications, Dana Blankenhorn

Perhaps no business has been so transformed by open source as encyclopedias.

The appearance of Wikipedia, and its many cousins, rivals and inlaws, has wrecked the business. Even giant Microsoft’s Encarta has succumbed, as of the end of this month.

We all know the jokes about Wikipedia’s accuracy, but since it beat the Encyclopedia Brittanica in a blind taste test nearly four years ago attention has focused more on making it better, or creating rivals to it, than knocking the idea of open source, crowdsourced content.

And now it’s in a box. Meet the Wikireader.

It’s about the size of a portable alarm clock, with a one-color screen, a MicroSD card, and a touchscreen with three buttons, running on two AAA batteries. Update the card on the company’s Web site or they’ll send you four updates a year for $30. The retail price is $99.

The designer is Sean Moss-Pultz, last seen helming the failed OpenMoko mobile phone project. It’s cute, and it has enough marketing muscle behind it to have a chance.

Will we see it under your Christmas tree this year? Maybe you know a kid who can use it, or a know-it-all relative.

It’s also part of a general trend, specialized, mass market devices designed to access just one piece of the Web. Certainly a trend worth watching.

I don’t know if you’ve ever thought of owning a really fine set of encyclopedias (my office has one from 1883) and I don’t know if you’d call Wikipedia fine. But at $99 it’s cheap as chips.

October 6th, 2009

Netgear offers an open source router that is an applications platform

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:09 am

Categories: Applications, Development, Distributions, GPL, General, Hardware, Internet, business models, wireless

Tags: 111Connection refused

Netgear launched a new open source router called the RangeMax Wireless-N, a Linux-based unit with both Gigabit Ethernet ports and ReadyShare USB storage access.

The company is supporting the downloading of firmware and community development around the router at a site called MyOpenRouter.com.

This is precisely what I wanted to see when I started writing my blog posts about “Always On” at Corante in 2003.

The idea is that with storage and processing at the router, applications can live in the air independent of the PC. Clients on such a network might include security systems, RFID chips so you could find your stuff, and medical applications living on your body.

I was allowed to speak about this vision at the 2004 Accelerating Change conference at Stanford, and it is gratifying to see it finally being supported.

Unfortunately, router vendors resisted this concept for a long time. Early Linux routers seemed to emerge by accident, after programmers found they were using open source code without releasing it, and they were not supported by marketing.

Now things are changing. It will be fun to see where it goes from here:

• Security systems that can let police watch your break-in in progress, even from their police cars.
• Home automation systems that know when to water the plants and turn the lights on-and-off while you’re gone.
• Music systems that find you and deliver your tunes to the nearest speakers.
• A way to find your keys, your wallet, and your hat if you’re senile or just have ADHD.
• Systems that monitor the aged so they can age at home, not a nursing home.
• Medical systems that monitor your heart and blood sugar while you sleep, so ER techs are there as you have your heart attack instead of your getting the victory hug from the fellow in the brite nitegown.

All this, and more, can be developed on a platform where routers act as servers, wireless does the work of wires, and clients can be as small as a single RFID chip.

Now get to work and make yourself some money.

October 1st, 2009

GroundWork Monitor 6.0 offers new view into virtual data center

Posted by Paula Rooney @ 8:19 am

Categories: Applications, FOSS, General, Microsoft, support, virtualization

Tags: Virtual Data Center, Performance, Dashboard, Microsoft Corp., JBoss, GroundWork, Data Center Virtualization, Virtualization, Performance Management, Open Source

GroundWork is a leading open source systems and network provider and recently enhanced its platform with JBoss and Microsoft System Center support.

That’s not all.  GroundWork Monitor 6.0, which shipped on September 2, offers a new “Seurat” view designed to allow administrators to access the status and performance of hundreds of hosts and services.  Version 6.0 also offers a redesigned status view that provides performance data in a single view.

The company quotes Cameron Haight, a Gartner Vice President, who comments that the Seurat View is a break from traditional topology and tree-style views, which may not be sufficient for dynamic, virtual data centers and cloud computing infrastructures.

Monitor 6.0 also features a revamped user interface based on the JBoss Portal and a new dashboard builder for both the community edition and enterprise editions.

The new user interface purports to offer finer grained, roles based access controls and a higher level of customization. The software’s new tailor made monitoring allows admins to to create and customize personal and roles based dashboards for any purpose.

Earlier this month, GroundWork announced the availability of a connector to integrate its software with Microsoft System Center. The GroundWork Connector, which is available standalone and separate from GW Monitor 6.0, pulls data from Microsoft System Center and displays it within GroundWork Enterprise Edition.

September 25th, 2009

Which is more reliable, the client or the cloud

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:32 am

Categories: Applications, Cloud Computing, General, Infrastructure, Internet, mass market

Tags: Client, Outage, Manufacturing, Cable, Software As A Service (SaaS), Network Technology, Telecommunications, Personal Technology, Emerging Technologies, Networking

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?

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September 21st, 2009

Will the open Internet become a partisan divide

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:58 am

Categories: Applications, General, Government, Infrastructure, Internet, LANs and WANs, Legal, Network Administration, Network Standards/Protocols, mass market, politics, telecom

Tags: Net Neutrality, Internet, Dana Blankenhorn

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 21st, 2009

Open source does not work well for bad guys

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:44 am

Categories: Applications, Development, General, Internet, Security

Tags: Malware, Malware Writer, Spyware, Adware & Malware, Cyberthreats, Viruses And Worms, Security, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

While some researchers expressfear of malware writers using open source to improve their work, a C|Net investigation shows it really does not help them.

Authors of the Limbo Trojan,. the most popular such program in the world in 2007, tried the open source model to reverse a slide in fortunes, Nick Heath wrote. It did not help. (Former ZDNet writer Richard Steinnon hosted the ThreatCast podcast, and I thought its logo was cute.)

The big problem? Revealing the code means delivering security companies everything they need to write an identifying virus “signature” for it. Even if you enhance the base program, the original signature will still identify it.

It’s in the nature of crime. A bad guy’s actions can only work if they are done in secret.

Secrecy, in fact, is behind the big new infection trend, “drive by” infections. A malware writer secretly gains control of a Web site address, places the malware there so it’s the first thing loaded by a visitor, then works to get page views as with any other web marketer.

Or, as The New York Times found out, a malware author may masquerade as a legitimate advertiser and place their work, as an ad, directly onto the pages of a widely-read site.

There is nothing open about any of this.

While malware writers are finding only limited success in open sourcing their work, the open source movement has been an enormous boon to the good guys. Programs like ClamAV, Snort, and BitDefender use the open source process for both development and distribution.

The bottom line here is that open source shines a light on code, and like cockroaches bad guys don’t like the light.

September 15th, 2009

Can Fast Flip build a business model

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:10 am

Categories: Applications, General, Google, Internet, business models, mass market

Tags: Google Inc., Google News, Publisher, FastFlip, Blogging, Benefits, Strategy, Internet, Human Resources, Management

Google News is much, much better, in many ways, than Google’s new FastFlip.

So why bother? Because, by giving publishers control over what content a user browses with the software, they can deliver Google a business model.

Google News has long been controversial with publishers for several reasons. The most important is that it uses a Google bot as its editor. All competing outlets are in the same vat of news, so you may end up seeing a second-hand iteration of the story, or a comment on it, before the actual reporting.

Google News has been around for several years, yet to this day there are no ads on its main page. It delivers revenue and links to publishers but no revenue to its maker. And the publishers still claim the site is “stealing” from them by adding lead paragraphs and thumbnail pictures.

In the past Google has sought to respond by doing deals with major news services like AFP and AP, hosting their stories on ad-soaked pages, passing along the bulk of the revenue. But this has cut the market for AP stories on partner Web sites. The solution just creates a new problem. Publishers scream louder.

FastFlip tries to solve this by limiting the number of outlets available. A page on politics culls just a dozen sources, each a scaled “professional” publishing organization willing to sign a business agreement.

Google hosts publisher pages on FastFlip, including ads, so there’s a defined business model and a benefit to publishers in faster page loads. Users can click through to “inside pages” so there’s a second publisher benefit, increased traffic.

The main benefit of FastFlip is that it keeps out the riffraff. Scaled, complete, “real” news sources, magazines, and publisher-owned sites only, please. If you’re not big enough to negotiate a contract with Google for your content, you’re not big enough to get on FastFlip.

By building a high barrier to entry against blogs and new entrants, and by having signed business agreements defining benefits and limiting Google’s interference with their product, FastFlip is a godsend to publishers.

And if you look at Google News itself, you’ll see a second bow to power. Click on a story claiming, say, 587 links and you’ll get an intermediate page highlighting the stories of “reputable” news services and publisher-owned blog sites.

By raising barriers to entry against individual blogs and open source news sites, Google hopes to get publishers off its back. But I doubt that will happen, because once the other side knows it can move you, it will keep moving you until you’re off the board.

September 8th, 2009

TomTom launches OpenLR open navigation project

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:27 am

Categories: Applications, Development, Distributions, GPL, General, Linux

Tags: TomTom, OpenLR, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

TomTom, the European GPS company that got into a patent battle with Microsoft early this year, is now launching an open source navigation project called OpenLR.

(The map to the right, from the OpenLR site, is part of a demonstration showing differences between OpenLR coding and that of the Traffic Management Science (TMC) system, which uses FM radios.)

TomTom settled the suit by agreeing to pay Microsoft based on its claims, which involve FAT file names, and to take the “offending” technology out of its products.

In July a Linux patch was released supporting long file names, which all vendors are being urged to use to avoid future litigation.

The idea of OpenLR is to open source overlays onto GPS databases, placing weather or traffic information on a system for instance. The system is map-agnostic so lots of vendors can use it.

TomTom is inviting other vendors into its sandbox to enhance the system. The code will be licensed under GPL v2. The technical documentation is under a Creative Commons license.

TomTom plans a presentation on OpenLR at the ITS World Congress in Stockholm September 21-25.

September 4th, 2009

How an open source camera will change photography

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:16 am

Categories: Apple, Applications, Development, General, Hardware, content

Tags: Software, Open Source, Camera, Marc Levoy, Dana Blankenhorn

What Stanford calls the Frankencamera does not look like much.

It’s big and clumsy and you don’t get much better performance as a result of that.

(This is a close-up from our Crave blog. The hands are those of graduate student Andrew Adams. No word on whether he’s related to Ansel.)

But because the new camera is based on a Nokia N95 smartphone, whose software is licensed by the open source Symbian Foundation, it can become a lot more.

Professor Marc Levoy plans to release a complete implementation for the camera in a year, a platform on which apps can be built.

Already he has created software for the camera that does things no commercial camera can do, like extend its “dynamic range” so all distances are optimally lit, and enhance the resolution of videos with still images.

The applications are endless, going well beyond hobbies.

Cameras that take pictures of speeders could have programs that enhance and re-take those images on cars that try to gray-out their license tags to avoid detection. Any attempt to evade photo detection might be automatically countered with the right combination of hardware and software.

It seems amazing that no camera company has yet sought to build an ecosystem based on software, but this is an area where open source really can innovate, since every application will be a new one.

Open source smart phone groups like Android, LiMo and Moblin should all be anxious to replicate what Levoy is doing in their phones.

One point Levoy did not make is that the Frankencamera software could be integrated with existing open source imaging software, like The Gimp, so developers of those programs can jump-start the ecosystem.

Levoy’s idea is also so obvious it’s impossible to believe a proprietary company can’t adapt it quickly enough.

How soon before we see camera apps at the Apple app store?

August 28th, 2009

Aussies give open source golden crumbs from Microsoft table

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:05 am

Categories: Applications, Enterprise Policy, GPL, General, Microsoft, education, marketing, mass market

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Audacity, FreeMind, MuseScore, Microsoft Windows 7, Open Source, Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Software, Dana Blankenhorn

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has begun fulfilling a promise to give every high school student a laptop, offering Lenovo machines with Windows 7 and some open source applications.

Most reporters covering the story down under are focused on the fact that at least 70,000 kids will get Windows 7 before the rest of us. But I would rather focus on those open source applications, which are not what you would call the usual suspects:

• GeoGebra is a package for teaching high school math. It starts with geometry but also branches into algebra and calculus. Created by Marcus Hohenwarter for a master’s thesis at the University of Salzburg, he now runs the project out of Florida State University.
• Audacity is a sound editor also available under Linux. It was launched at Carnegie-Mellon 10 years ago by by Dominic Mazzoni and Roger Dannenberg (Mazzoni is still on the team) and now makes its home on Sourceforge.
• FreeMind is a mind mapping program written in Java. Mind maps are a great way to outline and brainstorm, especially for those of us with ADD. It is not yet at Version 1.0, and it also lives at Sourceforge.
• MuseScore is a music composition and notation program, which has also yet to reach Version 1.0. It recently delivered its first stable release for the Macintosh, and its developers have just begun working on a branding program.

We are often obsessed in technology by control of the operating system, and in the business press by questions of money. But these fine programs are the tip of a very large iceberg, based in academia, that is slowly transforming education and the education process.

The reason you probably don’t hear more of this is because it is subject to what I call Moore’s Law of Training. There is no Moore’s Law of Training. People learn at the rate they learn, and knowledge is spread at a similar rate.

Any teacher interested in any of these Windows programs has to learn to use them, and has to develop coherent lesson plans for them. Both take time. Given how open source eliminates marketing budgets, it also takes time for news of such programs to spread.

But news does spread. News of these programs has spread all the way to Australia, and apparently to the highest realms of the New South Wales government.

With tens of thousands of Australian kids going to class this week carrying these programs they will spread even more quickly. So will curricula based on them. And, unlike 1990s’ multimedia curricula, these will be fairly stable, so long as the programs retain backwards compatibility, as most do.

These may be crumbs from the Microsoft table, but they are important crumbs. Get enough crumbs and you have the whole loaf. That is why I call these golden crumbs.

Almost makes me wish my kids were babies again. Note that I said almost.

August 24th, 2009

Open source reputations build brand loyalty

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:23 am

Categories: Applications, General, Google, Internet, Microsoft, marketing

Tags: Google Inc., Reputation, Brand, Brand Loyalty, Linux User, Linux, UNIX, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software

Let me start today by saying I have tried Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

I like it., It’s good. Sometimes it’s better than Google. (Illustration by Dan Ruby of Chitika, a search-targeted ad agency.)

Yet a search of my personal Web logs would doubtless find that Google still gets my business. This is partly out of loyalty to its open source heritage. All else being equal, reputation tips the balance.

And on the Internet, the most important thing to remember is all things always are equal.

It’s not just me. A recent study by Dan Ruby of Chitika found Google has 16% more market share among Linux users than Windows users. That’s 78% share on Windows, 94% on Linux.

Linux users are more like to go to Ask.Com than Bing. They may be more likely to shout their questions across the cube farm than try Bing.

What this tells me is that reputation has both positive and negative components. If you see a company as an enemy you may avoid them even if their stuff is better. Had Rupert Murdoch bought Facebook might MySpace have won the market? Maybe.

This holds important lessons for Microsoft. Having a better product may be less important than having a good reputation.

August 18th, 2009

Can tr.im find the right open source model

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:40 am

Categories: Applications, Internet, content, mass market

Tags: Twitter, Tr.im, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

Tr.im, a URL-shortening service that tried (and failed) to become the default on Twitter (which chose bit.ly) has, after flirting with a sale or closure, decided to go open source.

It’s all explained in a blogalicious post from co-founder Eric Woodward, who said that by September 15 Nambu will become an open source project offering its software under the GPL-compatible MIT license.

URL shorteners have been around for years, but the need for them became critical with the rise of Twitter, with its SMS-like 140-character message length. Twitter’s importance can be seen in a chart credited to Tweetmeme showing bit.ly with an 80% market share following its Twitter tie-up.

John Borthwick of Bit.ly told ReadWriteWeb that the Tr.im community will face an immediate problem of scaling. Scaling will take cash.

If a community can deliver cash, however, Tr.im could return some important value to the open source community and to the larger Web.

With the software open source any Web site will be able to offer its users URL shortening or incorporate that into its service. Tr.im also wants to work with Gnip.com to make aggregate anonymized user data available free.

While I applaud open source, I wonder whether the “community” model of open source is the one Tr.im really wants to pursue, since so much of its value seems pointed toward businesses. Communities are great for delivering volunteers and users, not so great for delivering the green.

Perhaps an alliance of businesses could support Tr.im on a model like that of Eclipse, or a scaled business could sponsor the project, delivering the relatively small amount of cash Tr.im needs to grow through open source.

August 17th, 2009

First look at stable Firefox 3.5

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:41 am

Categories: Applications, Distributions, General, Internet, Microsoft, mass market

Tags: Mozilla Firefox, Web Browsers, Internet, Dana Blankenhorn

When Mozilla invites you to download Firefox 3.5 oblige.

While it did take me several minutes to download the file this morning, the result seemed worthwhile.

All my regular add-ons loaded right away — your mileage may vary. I did find performance improved across the news sites I regularly visit. Even the most file-heavy such sites, like Weather.Com (with its time-release weather maps) moved well.

By contrast I had grown accustomed to a white bar near the top of Firefox 3.0. This was a visible sign that it was having trouble loading content.

I usually keep a half-dozen tabs open at any one time — prospective stories, mail — and run several other programs at the same time as well. My system tray is filled with crap that loads at start-up some of which I never use. And the main Windows machine here has moved twice with PC Relocator, which brings my crap along with my software.

In short this is a bad, dirty nasty naughty PC, with a highly fragmented hard drive and a lot of other programs fighting for processor attention. If Firefox works well here and (so far) it does, imagine what it can do on your nice, clean, obedient and well-tended machine.

August 12th, 2009

Will all the good open source companies be acquired?

Posted by Paula Rooney @ 1:44 pm

Categories: Applications, Development, Distributions, FOSS, GPL, General, Linux, Red Hat, Strategy, Sun Microsystems, business models, mergers & acquisitions, middleware

Tags: VMware Inc., SpringSource, OpenBravo, Open Source, Paula Rooney

Another one bites the dust.

Add SpringSource to the expanding list of independent open source companies that have been gobbled up by proprietary software giants.

Let’s consider the growing list: IBM’s purchase of Gluecode, Novell’s purchase of SUSE, Citrix’s XenSource deal, Nokia’s Trolltech buy, Sun’s purchase of MySQL, Oracle’s purchase of Sun (and hence MySQL and OpenOffice) and now VMware’s planned $420 million acquisition of SpringSource.

Is this what the founding open source developers envisioned?

Doubt it, but fewer open source backers are opposed to such mergers as the use of open source software expands in the corporate sector and mixed hybrid software stacks are growing up in the data center.

Open source is not toppling the ranks of proprietary software giants (yet) but the quiet revolution is taking place: the model of free and open software development has reduced vendor lock-in and is delivering enormous benefits to developers and customers, observers maintain. The acquisiton trend simply reflects this notion: industry titans can’t beat it so they’re joining open source, observers also maintain.

“I expect VMware will continue to invest and grow the platform and that bodes well for open source. I hope they realize that part of the value is the large number of people building on the platform for free,” said Larry Augustin, president and CEO of SugarCRM, a large open source CRM vendor. “VMware doesn’t have a long history in open source but this is a big bold step for them and I’m keeping my fingers crossed.”

“They did some contributions to the kernel and and made a free version of the hypervisor available but not in open source. This is their first big open source step and shows the value of these open source companies and platforms. ”

Some open source players question Oracle’s acquisiton of Sun but think the VMware-SpringSource marriage is a healthy one.

Open source is “a great production and distribution model, the latter being more important, that creates some truly enterprise-class products that customers need.   For software developers this is especially true, since they want unfettered access to products to try them and understand how they work without needing to engage in a lot of commercial activity, which they find to be a distasteful time sink,” said Jeff Hartley, VP of Products and Marketing (correction) of Terracotta, which develops open source clustering software for Java and partners with both VMware and SpringSource.

“With our software, you can look at the code if you really want to know how it works, and you can suggest improvements or become a committer and help make future products. This point about distribution is perhaps just one reason why VMware and SpringSource make sense together, with Spring as an open source provider,” Hartley said. “As VMware builds its portfolio of products to make enterprise software easier to build and manage, it needs to connect up the stack with developers. SpringSource has certainly done a good job of that and is a big help in high regard in the developer community and have fantastic adoption.”

Once upon a time, corporate behemoths like Microsoft, Sun and VMware were considered the greedy proprietary vendors that open source startups would one day replace. Yes?

But that’s not panning out. Open source has gained credibility but the industry has yet to spawn another billion-dollar baby.  So what shifted?

A realization that the open source business model may not be working as well as the open source development model? Or another aspect of open source’s bottom up success?

OpenBravo’s CTO recently said such deals are inevitable as proprietary giants infuse needed revenue into aspiring open source companies whose download count vastly exceeds their revenue.

Some think such marriages are ideal because they generate vendors with a healthy mix of  proprietary and open source software. This prevents lockin while ensuring commercial provders enjoy a profit.

But will all successful open source companies end up in the clutches of proprietary software titans?

Have IBM, Novell, Sun, Citrix, Oracle and VMware thrown in the towel and see open source as the inevitable future? Or are they simply gobbling up the competition to protect their revenue streams for as long as possible, or making strategic buys to counter their rivals’ open source acquisitions?

I question this each time one of these deals are announced. Call me a cynic. But one has to wonder about the viability of the open source business model if all of the top open source dogs are acquired by traditional software vendors.

It’s understandable that venture capitalists who seed open source companies want to cash out but it would be nice to see another open source business succeed besides Red Hat.

I wonder how long it will take for Microsoft to make its first open source acquisition. Care to weigh in on the likely targets?

August 6th, 2009

Code Red for XML open source

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:03 am

Categories: Applications, General, Security, java

Tags: Code Red Worm, Open Source, JRE, Python, XML, Virus, Cyberthreats, Java, Viruses And Worms, Security

In a sign of things to come, Codenomicon has issued an alert against “multiple critical security issues in XML libraries,” which include libraries from Sun, Apache, Python and GNOME.

Codenomicon said it found the issues early this year while developing a product for XML testing, and has already been working with Finland’s CERT-FI on remediation.

Recommendations and patches are already going out. (I first found this cute little guy in 2004, while I was blogging for Corante. A now extinct firm called Irenecrafts was offering instructions on making them.)

Both ZDNet’s UK security team and our own Joe McKendrick have been putting out the word, but it’s also important to note where we are in terms of Bruce Schneier’s famous “window of exposure” chart, first published in the year 2000.

The announcement of a vulnerability is a virus’s second level of fame. You know, who’s virus, get me virus, get me something like virus, get me young virus, and who’s virus. An announcement alerts virus writers to a vulnerability, and exploits follow, meaning the risk to users immediately starts jumping.

The peak moment of risk comes when a vendor discloses a patch, but it does not start declining until after users install the patch.

All this means that we are now entering the key window of vulnerability to this problem, and that window closes only after all your XML libraries have been updated.

If you own any of the following libraries you need to be alert and ready to patch:

• Python libexpat
• Apache Xerces
• Sun JDK and JRE 6 Update 14 and earlier
• Sun JDK and JRE 5.0 Update 19 and earlier.

Not only will servers and PCs be vulnerable until patches are installed, but so will embedded systems and mobile devices.

Sun says it has patched JRE 6 Update 15 and JRE 5 Update 19 but warns it has no workaround for earlier versions, so this may be around a while. Xerces got out a patch in June and one is in process for Python.