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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: FOSS
November 19th, 2009
Terracotta buys Quartz
Open source Java clustering software developer Terracotta announced its intent to buy an open source job scheduler known as Quartz.
The integration of Quartz into Terracotta’s platform will ease high availability job scheduling and scaling applications to multiple nodes, the company said. Quartz is currently integrated into SpringSource and Red Hat products and counts Adobe, Cisco, Level 3 and Vodaphone as big customers. It eliminates the need for a central database to handle coordination, Terracotta reports.
Terracotta, of San Francisco, intends to support the Quartz open source project and will maintain the code under the Apache 2.0 license.
The job scheduling software will enhance Terracotta’s use in virtualized and cloud infrastructures, the company says.
“Quartz is ideal for creating simple or complex schedules for triggering application tasks such as driving process workflow and generating application data reports and recurring system maintenance checkups,” according to a release issued by Terracotta on Thursday.
“Now, with the acquisition, Terracotta will quickly integrate Quartz within the Terracotta platform to enable users to easily scale applications in large virtualized environments and private clouds and to distribute the massive workloads characteristic of these environments,” Terracotta announced.
October 26th, 2009
Open source scores small victory at White House
Open source scored a victory at the White House this week with the government’s choice to switch to Drupal for whitehouse.gov.
The U.S. government’s technology team announced that it had selected the open source content management system to make http://www.whitehouse.gov more transparent to consumers and developers.
This will allow programmers to view, inspect and fix the web site’s code, government officials said. The news was reported over the weekend by the Associated Press.
Open Source for America has been pushing Obama’s government to embrace more open choice software as a way to reduce costs and drive open standards for more transparency. Last week, ConsortiumInfo’s Andy Updegrove wrote a blog urging Obama to choose more FOSS.
October 21st, 2009
Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora Linux updates prepped as Win7 release nears
As Microsoft gets set to launch Windows 7, Linux desktop vendors are trying to make some waves.
Yesterday, IBM and Canonical announced availability of a cloud and Linux-based business desktop alternative for existing PCs or low cost netbooks.
The IBM Client for Smart Work package , which was first introduced in Africa last month, runs Canonical’s Ubuntu and IBM’s Lotus Symphony office suite, Lotus Notes e-mail or LotusLive iNotes for cloud based email and other social networking tools. It can be hosted on site or in a cloud based model.
Canonical, Red Hat, CSS Corp, Compariv, Midas Networks, Virtual Bridges and ZSL are among the selling the package.
Also on Tuesday, Novell introduced SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 Service Pack 3, which offers upgraded Firefox browser and Novell GroupWise collaboration software and updated drivers to support the latest hardware and peripherals.
Meanwhile, Red Hat-backed open source organization Fedora on Tuesday announced the beta release of its next generation Linux code named “Constantine” which includes better video streaming support for the desktop.
October 9th, 2009
Seeking a Stallman for open source
In one of my earliest blog posts here I called Richard Stallman (right) a father of the open source movement and almost immediately got a personal nastygram. From Richard Stallman.
I appreciated it and have sought to be more careful. Stallman believes in free software, which he calls Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). (It’s also called Free Open Source Software (FOSS).)
Copyleft and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) are inherently political, a direct challenge to software as a business, and Stallman has never, ever thought of himself as a businessman.
Stallman is so idiosyncratic that he takes pains on his personal Web page to note that the views expressed there aren’t even those of the FSF or its GNU Project. They’re just Stallman’s. Stallman is Stallman.
Yet despite Stallman’s Brian-like rejection of leadership, many in open source still revere him and many outside open source still use him to discredit the movement.
Jason Perlow believes this is stupid. I agree. Unfortunately open source, as a business movement, lacks any figure with the messianic qualities Stallman brings to the party.
There’s also this. Much of Perlow’s anger, and that of our own Matt Asay, is directed at Stallman’s continued contempt for Microsoft, his suspicion that Microsoft’s every action is part of some grand conspiracy. Perlow, Asay, and the open source movement (as opposed to FLOSS) want to make peace with Microsoft.
Stallman, if he is considered a leader of the open source movement, is an obstacle to that peace deal.
Microsoft’s MS-PL license is now officially recognized by the OSI. Microsoft’s Codeplex is an active open source site. Microsoft has given serious money to its open source efforts and sought to work more closely with open source companies.
But Microsoft, and those companies like Novell that have come into its orbit, are explicitly rejected by FLOSS advocates, and no one from that orbit has emerged as a spokesman in the way that Stallman has.
There is an implication in Perlow’s piece (mouse over the illustration at its top) that Miguel de Icaza, credited with launching both Mono and GNOME, should be that alternative spokesman. This is partly due to Stallman’s focusing on him as “a traitor” to the FLOSS movement.
Technically he is. But as I’ve noted before, being a traitor to FLOSS does not make you a traitor to open source. The two things are quite different, even if they share a license in the GPL. And open source, as opposed to to FLOSS, does lack a leader. a spokesman, a Stallman if you will.
Will de Icaza take the job? And will the movement follow him?
Loading ...October 2nd, 2009
Open source is sold and FOSS is not
I have spent many pleasant hours with Matt Asay’s latest, “The wrong marketing for open source.”
I think I finally figured it out. Matt says that FOSS software can’t be sold while open source can be.
This is a feature, not a bug. It’s why the GNU smiles.
Much of my confusion involves the GPL and FOSS. The GPL was created as a FOSS license but it remains the most popular open source license out there.
I explained the reason in my 2006 piece The Open Source Incline. Giving outside contributors the same rights you enjoy is the best way to encourage their participation. For an open source company the GPL helps drive development and the construction of a community, which it needs to thrive.
So the GPL, while created for FOSS, is also used by open source. And there remains a key difference between FOSS software and open source, which Matt nails. Open source is sold and FOSS is not.
What marks a FOSS project is not its license but the motivation behind it. A FOSS project is not driven by dreams of financial gain. It’s driven by dreams of service, of shared effort helping all boats rise. The Mozilla Foundation is not about the Benjamins even though Firefox uses a Mozilla license rather than the GPL. Money keeps things moving but no one is getting rich.
Open source combines the shared effort of FOSS and marries it to the profit motive. Open source developers share code in order to sell support, or services, or products built using the code. The key word in the previous sentence is sell.
Open source is sold, FOSS is downloaded. Open source companies are looking for a profit, FOSS projects are looking to get by, to grow, to serve and to share.
Matt makes his living as an open source executive with Alfresco. Alfresco uses the GPL, but it’s an open source company, not a FOSS project. Alfresco wants to make money. Making money is good.
But how much money? To an open source company, the answer is as much as possible. To a FOSS project the answer is enough to get by.
There is nothing wrong with either model. Both can, in fact, use the same licenses, or different licenses. But if someone comes to you wearing a suit, a smile, and their hand out, it matters little what license their wares may carry. They’re still a salesman.
They’re open source.
October 1st, 2009
GroundWork Monitor 6.0 offers new view into virtual data center
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 28th, 2009
I for one welcome no overlords
Inside our own Matt Asay’s latest hymm to open source (as opposed to FOSS) is this simple message.
He accepts Microsoft as overlord. (Kent Brockman, right, from Wikipedia, famously welcomed “our insect overlords” in the episode “Deep Space Homer,” co-starring Buzz Aldrin as himself.)
Open source embraces interoperability, whereas free software takes a hard line that even Microsoft, despite its preference that customers use its complete software portfolio exclusively, won’t take.
This has always been true. FOSS is idealism, 80-proof distilled idealism, and the open source movement was born in 1998 as a reaction against that.
It’s not news. So why is Matt acting like it is? Here’s why:
Sometimes that openness will mean embracing Microsoft in order to meet a customer’s needs. After all, fierce partisanship and an unwillingness to compromise in software accomplishes is just as pointless, distasteful, and useless as it is in government.
Note our difference in emphasis. Matt put italics on “in order to meet a customer’s needs.” I think the more important message here is embracing Microsoft.
I do not think Microsoft is an evil empire, by the way. I accept the premise of the book “Burning the Ships,” that its IP policy is aimed mainly at letting Microsoft compete in growing markets than at demanding monopoly rents on Linux.
But Matt’s growing distaste for Eben Moglen and Bruce Perens and (especially, even personally) Richard Stallman is both unseemly and silly. Free software advocates have always been transparent and upfront on what they were trying to do. Microsoft, by contrast, has often been opaque, sometimes deliberately so.
The argument between FOSS and open source has never been about economic systems. It has been about the meaning of freedom.
It revolves around Stallman’s fourth freedom, the idea that when you are given something and you improve it you have an obligation to share the improvement so that the realm of freedom can advance.
Stallman calls this patriotism. Matt now seems to think it’s communism.
BSD licenses like Eclipse, Apache and Mozilla let people take more than they give and profit from it. Microsoft’s MS-PL license lets it do this on a massive scale. The fact that Matt now embraces this idea, and embraces Microsoft’s overlordship over everything it has copyrighted, doesn’t mean he’s a hero of capitalism and the rest of us are dirty rotten commies.
It means he’s a businessman. Business is not about ideals of any sort. Businessmen exist in every country, under every form of government. They even existed under Soviet Communism, even if they didn’t call themselves businessmen. Business is about seeking advantage, taking it, and building on it.
You can mix business with idealism, but you don’t have to. This is the revised bargain of open source. To the extent that Microsoft accepts this bargain businessmen involved with open source are free to accept Microsoft. Always have been.
Just don’t expect FOSS advocates to kiss your ring for it, or give up their ideals because you’ve made a deal. They have their values, you have yours.
Let’s leave it at that.
September 23rd, 2009
Why Africa gets the IBM-Ubuntu bundle and you do not
Irregular readers of this space may be wondering why IBM and Ubuntu are partnering on a Linux bundle for Africa but not here.
It’s something regular readers should have memorized by now.
There is a price lower than free.
Note the go-to-market strategy, as detailed by our fearless leader Larry Dignan:
IBM said it will distribute the SmartWork client through Africa via local service providers such as Inkululeko and ZSL Inc. The aim is to spread the IBM/Canonical software through government and educational institutions and businesses.
The short version is that IBM and Canonical (Ubuntu’s commercial arm) are mainly going to load the software on government and ISP servers, then wait for the clients to come to them.
This is not how developed markets work. Developed markets work through distribution. Vendors must invest heavily to push product through the channel, as well as support it. This is why Taiwanese OEMs abandoned Linux for Windows last year.
Netbook hardware will ship to Africa running Windows, but the IBM download will transform those machines into Ubuntu devices that handle some client functions locally but can also go online to connect people together. This is a good deal for IBM because its investment is low and already made up in favorable publicity.
My problem is the cloud. We already know how bad Africa’s online links are. When the best broadband in South Africa is outrun by a pigeon with a stick memory strapped to its leg, we are talking s-l-o-w. The infrastructure there just can’t handle a cloud-based solution.
Instead of offering the software via download, it might be better to put sticks on thousands of pigeons and just let them loose.
In fact the real hope is that the endorsement of a government or university will make this a standard offering on their local networks.
It’s up to Canonical to make all this work. Founder Mark Shuttleworth is South African by birth. This deal has his name written all over it. It will be an immense challenge to scale this effort up, assuming the IBM name and Shuttleworth’s fame lead governments to support it.
And you have to figure that if he can make it there, he can make it anywhere…but he can’t even try for New York until he has scaled a solution thousands are happy with.
September 14th, 2009
Open source loves profit
The biggest lie told about open source is that those who practice it hate making money, that they are anti-capitalist.
(Picture from those dirty commies at Wikimedia Commons.)
Some people within the FOSS community do feel that way, of course. They are idealists first, developers second. It is thanks to such people that software is now a hollow mountain, the insides visible and little bits of open innovation pushing through the crust here and there.
It’s just silly to tar the whole movement with that broad brush, as Matt Asay does in tracking the attitudes of some to recent moves by Microsoft and Oracle.
He uses a pushquote to note the words of cartoonist and wine importer Hugh MacLeod, that “It’s easy to spot a purist. They’re the ones without any skin in the game.”
That’s some nice snark, but the reply is it depends on what you mean by skin.
GPL programmers, those who contribute code, have lots of skin in the game, real skin, skin that is more important to them than money. To disparage those in open source who value something other than a bank balance is to call the bulk of it anti-capitalist, when it’s just not.
Lots of people support the GPL because it’s the bottom of the open source incline. They operate transparently because that’s at the bottom of the open source development incline. They have skin in the game, but their lives have fewer zeroes than yours, Matt. They get by with a little help from their friends.
Marc Fleury did a $350 million deal for JBOSS, still one of the largest open source deals on record, and that was for GPL software. Come to think of it, so is mySQL, which came out with $1 billion from Sun.
Marc is now backing another open source project, Open Remote, not because he’s gone Communist but because he knows the best way to clear an impasse of proprietary agendas is to take money out of the equation and move forward.
If you want people to help you develop your software, give them equal rights to yours. If you really want them to help you, play as straight as possible with them. You can still make money. Your community will be thrilled if you do, because they want jobs.
Microsoft doesn’t play that way. In part this is natural, because their code base cost a fortune to develop and so their contribution to open source extensions will always be out-sized compared with those of small developers, as will the benefit they derive.
If you accept those rules. Matt, by all means play by them.
Just don’t throw stones at those who would rather take their software efforts elsewhere.
September 9th, 2009
OIN outmanuevers Microsoft, buys Linux patents
The Open Invention Network seems to have one upped Microsoft. Or has Microsoft one upped OIN?
Either way, it’s win-win for Linux.
Yesterday, OIN, whose mission is to defend Linux and open source from patent trolls, purchased 22 Linux related patents Microsoft recently sold to Allied Security Trust.
OIN chief executive Keith Bergelt would not say how much OIN spent on the patents but said it was a “meaningful amount.”
He said the open source community lucked out because the seller, AST, is not a patent troll. AST, not an investment vehicle, recently purchased the patents from Microsoft to “ensure that they did not fall into the hands of non-practicing entities that could seek to assert the patents against Linux products,” the press release stated.
Bergelt does not take issue with Microsoft’s rights to assert and sell its intellectual property but he did question why the software giant blocked OIN from the bidding.
Was it an overight? Or an attempt by Microsoft to circulate potentially dangerous IP bombs into the patent troll community?
The patents covered open source software related to operating systems and desktop and broader applications, Bergelt said. Some of them were purchased from former Unix vendor SGI.
“I don’t begrudge Microsoft’s opportunity to generate a fair return on their IP but I’m concerned about a strategy of selling Linux related and open source software patents to trolls,” Bergelt said to this blogger. No, they have not done this before and I’d hope it doesn’t happen again.”
He said it’s possible that leaving OIN out of the bidding was an oversight on Microsoft’s part — but not probable.
“I can’t imagine how they could justify it,” Bergelt said about Microsoft’s IP execs not being informed about OIN. “It [appears to be] an elegant way of insulating [the company] from criticism by [trying to]sell it to a troll.”
Again, AST is not a troll, Bergelt emphasized. But did Microsoft know that?
Sure, Microsoft made some money on the Linux related patents. That has to be annoying to OIN members who paid for them.
But this is a win-win for Linux. It demonstrates that Microsoft has not been able to cook up an uber mega legal case against Linux (maybe?) if it is selling Linux related patents to smaller entities.
And the more Linux related patents Microsoft sells, the fewer it owns.
It also demonstrates that OIN is functioning very well in the marketplace. For the money it paid, the Linux defense organization — which is backed by IBM, Novell and Red Hat, among others — has gained more patents to its own growing portolio and prevented the trolls from gaining control of 22 linux related ones. The OIN protfolio is now just south of 300 patents and more are coming.
OIN created 45 of its own and has another 45 patent applications in the works designed to protect the Linux roadmap over time.
September 7th, 2009
Why open source remains an ideological divide
Matt Asay has a piece today that is the tech equivalent of a Barack Obama speech.
He tries, once again, to remove ideology from the discussion of open source vs. proprietary software. He urges consensus, the best of both worlds, and asks can’t we all just get along?
As in politics the answer often turns out to be no, because there is a basic ideological divide here.
Proprietary companies succeed by imposing a top-down structure on software development and using sales revenue to keep everyone in line. I mean everyone — marketing, legal, support, development, and customers, too.
With proprietary software you’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus. Leave the firm and you lose access to your code. Leave it as a customer and you lose all your past work, along with much of your knowledge.
You become the business equivalent of David Brock or John Dean. (This is not a political point. Think Dennis Miller or the late Ron Silver, who went the other way.) In religious terms you are apostate, exiled. There seems to be no middle ground.
Open source offers a bottom-up structure of development but money is something of an afterthought. By that I mean you focus first on the job at hand, then build a business model around it, rather than the other way around.
You gain freedom but lose money. The marketing money, the distribution money, all that lovely gelt that bought the lawyers and the trade show booths and the incentive prizes to exotic destinations, is out of your life.
Unless you consider Portland exotic.
This divide between money-is-all and money-is-not-all is baked into the system. You don’t want to turn into Richard Stallman when you take the open source road, you may even reject him personally, but you soon find a daily shave is not necessary, and that broken-in sneakers are really quite comfortable.
Open source, as distinguished from FOSS, is an attempt to marry the best of both worlds, to build a business around a free model.
But no matter how capitalistic you may sound your hippie business heritage remains, and the best way to build a community around your software may still mean the GPL. Development will still require transparency.
Here’s where we turn back to politics.
When conservatives want to attack President Obama the first epithet they usually sling is “socialist.” What they mean is a demand economy, as in Cuba or the old Soviet Union. They don’t usually mean Sweden, or the Netherlands, or England or Canada, where life seems quite comfortable.
If you think of Stallman as Cuba and a company like Red Hat as Sweden, you get the ideological dilemma both Asay and our President face today.
I like shopping at Ikea. The solution for open source? Accept the limits and be proud of what you are. As to the President? Tune in Wednesday, but don’t expect it to be followed by a Republican chorus of Kumbaya.
Point is, Matt, in the end you have to choose a side. I say stand proudly with your friends or you get run over. Be open source, recognize the difference between that and the proprietary model, and go forward. If they want to give you the black hat for that, wear it proudly.
Stand for something.
August 31st, 2009
Should open source hate Apple?
Apple is not the dominant computing platform.
It’s true that Apple is just as proprietary a company as Microsoft. Some might say more so. But there is a big difference between competing with proprietary products and holding a monopoly with them which you use to keep open source down.
There is a reason that history records a case called U.S. vs. Microsoft. Microsoft has both a monopoly and a proven record of using its power to keep open source from gaining a foothold.
Apple, meanwhile, has just a 10% share of the operating system market. Sure, if they had more they might be dangerous, just like if I looked like Antonio Banderas I might be a movie star.
Microsoft did not really change its tune after the court case wound down.
- Microsoft subsidizes the channel so every PC in the store runs Windows, even netbooks where that’s more trouble than it’s worth.
- Sharepoint is designed specifically to extend its monopoly.
- Remember the OOXML standards battle, where Microsoft corrupted the standards process itself to maintain control of the applications market?
- The Novell deal, in which Linux vendors admit that 2+2=5 so Microsoft won’t assert non-existent patent claims against them, still gets me mad every time I think about it.
Now it’s true that Apple supports Digital Rights Management (DRM), and limits what users can do. The Free Software Foundation is dead set against DRM. But this was the industry’s price for even letting Apple offer a product like the iPod.
The music industry’s reaction led to Apple offering to forego DRM and may be the biggest victory open source won in this decade.
Or take the iPhone. Sure it’s designed to enforce AT&T’s control of bits, and in so doing enforce Apple’s control of what you do with the device. But it’s the Apple-AT&T relationship that is objectionable. The handset market is increasingly competitive.
The whole idea that the Free Software Foundation should go against Apple rather than Microsoft, then, is a straw man. Apple may want the control over users and markets that Microsoft has enjoyed this decade, but it doesn’t have that control, nor is it likely to achieve it.
August 12th, 2009
Will all the good open source companies be acquired?
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 10th, 2009
Microsoft still pushing a standards tax
While putting it in the way of the weasel, Microsoft is still pushing what amounts to a tax on users of Internet standards.
(Image from Amazon.com.)
It’s doing this through a definition of “open standards” that would mandate standards bodies to consider patented, protected, proprietary technology on a par with truly open source offerings, and encourage companies to pack standards bodies with paid employees.
The way Jason Matusow, Microsoft director of corporate standards, does this would do credit to any Senator seeking to filibuster a wildly-popular measure.
He calls it “balance.”
I fundamentally still believe that innovations are opportunities…and that is a good thing (for the inventor and for society). But the “no IP restrictions” concept of “open standards” does away with too much. Out of balance.
In this Matusow is pretending not to know what having a standard means. It means everyone must use whatever it is you offer. Standards are, almost by definition, not innovative. They are what everyone has, what everyone is required to have.
If a standard includes “IP restrictions” of any sort, especially royalties (no matter how reasonable or necessary you consider them) you’re imposing a tax on all users for your invention.
My idea of balance is a bit different. Innovations are a good thing. But by the time an innovation reaches a standards body it’s no longer an innovation.
Standards are a base line. They’re the minimum entry point for performing a basic function. Any royalty or limitation on using a basic function represents a private tax against all users by one vendor.
If we learned anything at all from the OOXML debate it should be that any Microsoft victory there was pyrrhic. ODF was able to deliver on its standard long before Microsoft could change its own proprietary scheme to match what the ISO approved.
If their idea was to bury ODF in the corporate user base, Microsoft failed, and at enormous cost, both to its own reputation and that of the ISO standards bodies.
I think other companies saw this and will push back hard against any future Microsoft attempts to place its own proprietary technology ahead of open source, or at least royalty-free, offerings in the future. I think the standards bodies themselves have learned to read Microsoft pronouncements carefully, and assume weasel language, something that will cost Microsoft dearly for a long time to come.
But I wonder whether Microsoft has learned anything. (Tip of the hat to Raiden’s Realm for pointing out the need for a wag of the finger.)
July 8th, 2009
Will ChromeOS make Google more loved or hated in open source world?
Google’s plans to launch an open source operating system is not only a potential game changer for Microsoft but also likely a big blow for Ubuntu and other Linux hopefuls on the desktop.
But its success depends somewhat on support by the open source community. Google promises to open source its code later this year and will “soon” begin working with the open source community.
Provided those promises are kept, the Chrome OS, an open source, web focused and lightweight OS, will spread like wildfire on netbooks and laptops. A clean interface? A fast bootup? The dream has come true.
For more than a decade I have written about Linux’s prospects on the desktop and quoted many who predicted Microsoft’s massacre at the hands of the open source operating system. Today, Linux holds less than two percent market share and few would make the same prediction today without looking silly.
For many in the open source camp, Ubuntu is (or was) the game changer that would have Microsoft at least scurrying to protect its virtual ownership of the desktop. Michael Dell virtually endorsed it.
Ubuntu has enjoyed some success on the desktop, particularly on the netbook, but I think it’s fair to say that it hasn’t turned out to be the commercial success that once seemed possible.
Google’s Chrome OS — like its counterpart browser — may be the real shot heard ’round the world. Google says it will be available to consumers in the second half of 2010 but I’ll bet it makes its debut on netbooks within a year’s time.
Why talk about it now?
“Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve,” Google wrote on its introductory blog yesterday.
“Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.”
Dreamy. This should be exciting stuff for open source backers (and for the rest of the world) but few in the community are celebrating. Google’s commercial strength and market power have always undermined its efforts to get support in the open source sector. For many, Google is simply the next gen Microsoft pretending the carry the open source banner but not really abiding by the core principles of the movement.
In its first year on the market, for instance, the open source Chrome browser has amassed only less than two percent market share while Firefox, the original open source browser, rocks at almost 23 percent share. It’s still too early to judge which one will reign but most in the open source community would prefer Mozilla’s success.
It’s just the vibe I get. Am I wrong?
Google has its open source backers and several prominent people in the open source world are employed by Google. Perhaps its seemingly inevitable success is probable whether or not it the general open source community cares. What’s your take?
Is Google more loved or hated today by the open source community? Why? Dies it matter?
And what impact will the introduction of the Chrome OS have on Google’s reputation in the open source community? Please weigh in.
July 7th, 2009
Will Microsoft promise split the open source movement
When we last left “As the .Net Turns,” Richard Stallman was promising that Microsoft would never, ever marry his open source daughter.
Now Microsoft has raised the tension in the room by giving that daughter a ring, to the cheers of the rest of her family.
We join our show already in progress.
Microsoft’s announcement that it will invoke its community promise regarding C# and the Common Language Infrastructure may be causing a split between the Free Software Foundation and Ubuntu.
The promise was made to reinforce Ubuntu’s decision to support Mono, an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .Net which includes the two technologies, in an installation of Debian Linux, on which Ubuntu is based.
The move doesn’t clearly put Mono under the Community Promise, however.
Stallman edited his anti-Mono screed last night, noting that the Debian supporting Mono is not the default version, but he has not yet backed down from his criticisms.
With Debian and Ubuntu now accepting Microsoft’s word that Mono is truly open source and Stallman staying outside the tent, there is a growing political split at the heart of the free software movement.
The split is over whether Microsoft’s promise on C# and the CLI extends to Mono and whether the Mono version of .Net should be accepted as a standard part of Linux.
If it is, then Microsoft may be embraced as an “open core” vendor like other enterprise open source companies.
If Stallman and the FSF stay outside the growing consensus that open source .Net is legitimate, on the other hand, they could find themselves isolated.
But if “open core” is a perfectly legitimate open source stance, users may always wonder what is inside the core and what outside, an ambiguity vendors (starting with Microsoft) could use to end the free software era.
Stay tuned.
But before you do, answer this. Will you TiVo past the commercials?
June 30th, 2009
Will Stallman C# warning fall flat?
Richard Stallman (right) of the Free Software Foundation sees C# and Mono as a Microsoft conspiracy and is warning developers away from it.
Stallman’s fear is that Microsoft will use its software patents to force open source C# implementations, and applications, underground.
Any move toward bringing C#, which Microsoft developed and Mono, which Microsoft supports, into the center of the Linux community must therefore be resisted.
The problem is not in the C# implementations, but rather in Tomboy and other applications written in C#. If we lose the use of C#, we will lose them too. That doesn’t make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk.
Stallman’s problem is that this horse has left the barn. C# is both an ISO and Ecma standard. The fact it’s part of a Microsoft-developed Common Language Infrastructure is irrelevant at this point.
Microsoft can end this controversy with a press release, and a simple legal document, promising not to enforce software patent rights on the software. But how likely is that?
Loading ...June 25th, 2009
Firefox 3.5 final prepped to ship early next week
The Mozilla team made available another release candidate of Firefox 3.5 last night.
But RC3 is of little interest. What’s most exciting is news that Firefox 3.5 will ship early next week.
That’s the pledge of the development team, which indicated its final ship plans after meeting this week.
Firefox 3.5 should be considered a major update to its predecessor, Firefox 3.0, which shipped last June.
The open source browser is faster, supports many HTML5 capabilities and offers a private browsing mode as well as open source audio/video streaming capabilities.
Initially, developers planned a .1 release but scaled up the plans after Google came out with its own open source browser, called Chrome, last year.
Looks like Firefox has little to fear — as of today. NetApplications cited Firefox’s market share at 22.5 percent, while Google’s Chrome struggles at less than two percent.
Mozilla claims that more than one million people are beta testing Firefox 3.5 at this point. Care to share your thoughts on the near final with this blogger?
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.
June 22nd, 2009
First release candidate of Firefox 3.5 posts Friday as expected
The Mozilla team reached a major milestone Friday by making available the first release candidate of Firefox 3.5.
As expected, version 3.5 Release Candidate 2 was released after 4 pm on June 19th.
Earlier in the week, the Firefox team released second builds of RC1 to about 800,000 existing beta testers. On Friday, RC2 became officially available for download.
Mozilla is pitching it as the fastest Firefox ever. But version 3.5 also comes equipped with many features not originally planned for the first update to Firefox 3.0, which shipped last June.
These include private browsing mode, a new TraceMoneky javascxript engine and support for the HTML5 and elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio.
Observers agree that the surprise release of Google’s open source browser called Chome last year altered the release plans and feature set of Firefox 3.X. And though Chome has enjoyed a nice uptick since its introduction, it appears that the first and most popular open source browser has remained strong in terms of market share and support.
According to Net Applications data for this quarter, Firefox holds more than 22 percent market share next to Microsoft Internet Explorer’s 66 percent, while Chrome has amassed just about 1.7 percent market share.
Chris Maresca, an open source consultant, said Firefox is still the preferred browser in the open source community.
“Regarding Chrome — I think the jury is still out,” Maresca said. “What makes Firefox great is the ecosystem and the community. The produce all kinds of addons, extensions and themes that allow people to make it into whatever they want. I don’t know if Google will be able to reproduce this, particularly since the most popular Firefox extensions would take away some of [Google's] business (eg. AdBlock).”
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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