December 31st, 2008

AMD move brings open source gaming closer

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:42 am

Categories: Development, General, Hardware, gaming

Tags: Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Games, Linux, Open Source, Personal Technology, Operating Systems, Software, Dana Blankenhorn

In writing about the open source rollup yesterday I added the gaming market almost as an afterthought.

The problem has always been that the graphics drivers needed for really high-end gaming just were not available through open source.

Yesterday AMD tore down that wall.

Thanks to some determined AMD engineers the company was able to release open source Linux code for its GPU series of graphics accelerators.

Nvidia is still holding out, but with open source AMD code available it may start feeling the pressure soon.

Developers need more, but these moves could bring AMD’s ATI subsidiary market share in more than gaming systems. High-end CAD and medical markets can now have “clean” Linux implementations free of proprietary restraints.

Linux netbooks may also get a boost if they’re encouraged by game designers to put ATI chips into their specifications.

I admit my first thought on hearing this was, “Oh, another market flailure tosses open source code over the side.” (Yes, the first l in flailure is intentional. They haven’t failed yet, but they are flailing.)

That’s not entirely true. In graphics AMD is quite competitive. Now, in 2009, it will be more so.

We hope.

December 15th, 2008

Can open source save gaming companies?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 9:07 am

Categories: Applications, General, Internet, Strategy, gaming, marketing

Tags: Games, Open Source, Personal Technology, Dana Blankenhorn

News that Myst Online is going open source has excited some people.

But is this a valid test of the open source concept?

Not unless it actually succeeds. As with many past attempts to grasp open source the way a quicksand victim grasps a vine, Myst open source is an act of desperation.

As Cyan Worlds notes, the software’s former home, Gametap, basically shut it down. This is more like your favorite failed TV show looking for a cable deal.

Second, Cyan Worlds is not really in a position to fund further development. It’s trying to make the game work on iPods, which might bring in some bucks.

But the rest of the development work is being tossed over the side in the hopes a community will magically appear, catch it, and turn it into something.

Given some help this might actually happen. A general purpose game engine, under open source, might enable a host of new games to emerge. If gamers can be turned into programmers.

Unlike the situation 20 years ago I don’t know if that is possible. My son is an avid gamer, but he has resisted my every effort to turn him toward programming. Just because you watch TV doesn’t mean you’re going to produce a TV show.

Of course, one kid does not a trend make. It is possible that a host of unemployed, game-fanatic programmers are going to ride to the rescue of Myst Online and turn it once again into a magical realm.

However this is not the way to bet.

August 20th, 2008

Novell-Microsoft interop pact may look sweeter to IT shops these days

Posted by Paula Rooney @ 11:25 am

Categories: Applications, General, Linux, Linux Desktop OS, Microsoft, gaming

Tags: Novell Inc., Interoperability, Information Technology, Microsoft Office, ISO, Microsoft Corp., Office Open XML, Virtualization, OpenOffice, Cloud Computing

Novell took a lot of heat from open source backers for executing an interoperability pact with Microsoft in late 2006 but the partnership — strengthened with a new $100 million investment from Microsoft today — is probably looking sweeter to mixed IT shops these days.

Why? Because of recent events in the virtualization and document format compatibility fronts, notably Microsoft’s recent release of its Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor and the ISO’s recent approval of Microsoft’s OOXML as a standard document format. In theory, these means that IT users will increasingly need solutions to integrate open source virtualization and Office suites with Microsoft’s propietary Hyper-V hypervisor and OOXML-based Office suite.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced a major relaxation of its virtualization licensing policy that will enable customers to more freely run and manage virtual machine workloads across server farms. This alone will be a huge benefit to any IT shop using VMware or Citrix XenServer.  But it seems apparent now that it will be even a bigger benefit for customers running Windows Server with Novell’s Xen-based SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Virtualization is complicated enough to deploy using a standalone solution. Creating a mixed vitualization environment exacerbates the complexity. If I were a customer, I’d be happy that Novell and Microsoft today reiterated the pledge to cooperate on interoperability.

(A note for hard liners: I’m not saying I am a proponent of the partnership. I am merely a neutral observer speculating how an IT manager might perceive the announcement today).

On August 15, the ISO and IEC technical boards announced that they will not consider any appeals on its decision to approve Microsoft’s Office Open XML formats as a document format standard. ODF, which is implemented in OpenOffice, the open source competitor to Microsoft Office — was previously approved as a standard by ISO. (Frankly, I’m not surprised that ISO decided to approve OOXML in spite of open source protests, since Microsoft Office has hundreds of millions of users across the globe and is currently the de facto standard).

From a customer perspective, it means that IT managers and users will have to worry about making sure any flavor of OpenOffice (including IBM’s Symphony) is interoperable with Microsoft Office.  No big surprise: document format interoperability is critical to ongoing business operations and must be assured before anyone will adopt OpenOffice.

The fact is, ODF-based Office suites are already very interoperable with Microsoft Office due to ECMA specifications and the fine work of many open source developers. But there’s more work to be done on macros. I’m not sure how sincere Microsoft is about making it easier for customers to use OpenOffice. Still, if I were a CIO contemplating adding OpenOffice to the mix, having a guarantee of interoperability from Microsoft would make me feel a lot better about moving in that direction.

In the press release issued today about the enhanced partnership, the Redmond, Wash company identified these two areas that need interoperability. Again, am not sure how sincere the company is but I’d feel better as a customer that I have this pledge on paper to make both companies accountable. “Through their joint interoperability lab in Cambridge, Mass., and other initiatives, will continue their close technical collaboration on a wide variety of solutions including virtualization, systems management, directory and identity federation, document format compatibility, accessibility technology, and the Moonlight multimedia framework,” according to statement issued Wednesday.

June 23rd, 2008

Developers criticize Nvidia, other holdouts for hindering Linux desktop

Posted by Paula Rooney @ 12:41 pm

Categories: Applications, Distributions, FOSS, GPL, Hardware, Linux, Red Hat, Software Licensing, gaming

Tags: Desktop, Developer, Linux Desktop, NVidia Corp., Driver, Graphics, Linux Kernel Developer, Open Source Driver, Linux, UNIX

Linux kernel developers are getting tougher on Nvidia and a few other holdouts that have refused to release open source drivers.
More than 100 Linux kernel developers – including top developer Andrew Morton – issued a letter today condemning closed source modules or drivers for Linux to be “harmful and undesirable. ” The group cites filesystems and security add ons as modules but clearly it’s the driver vendors driving them mad.
“We have repeatedly found them to be detrimental to Linux users, businesses and the greater Linux ecosystem,” the letter stated. “Such modules negate the openness, stability, flexibility and maintainability of the Linux development model and shut their users off from the expertise of the Linux community.”
The letter is a not so veiled swipe at Nvidia, manufacturer of the world’s best selling graphics cards.  To date, two of the three leading graphics card suppliers – Intel and ATI – have produced open source drivers, while Nvidia has not.
It is no doubt obvious that Linux – and indeed any modern operating system – must support a high end, seamless graphical experience on the desktop to survive and thrive.In a recent essay, dubbed Linux Graphics: A Tale of Three Drivers, Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board Chair James Bottomley pointed the finger at NVidia for sticking with its binary driver model.
He maintains that Nvidia’s holdout is a big problem for the Linux desktop because its harder to get fixes for binary drivers and so when new and inexperienced Linux users run into problems, they often ascribe the problem to Linux—not the binary driver.  NVidia was not available for e-mail comment as of this writing.
Intel has been producing one source drivers for its graphics cards and chipsets for many years. In 2007, after its acquisition by AMD,  No. 3 card supplier ATI acquiesced and contracted with Novell to produce the open source driver, known as radeonhd.  X.org also produced a rival driver and earlier this year ATI hired one of the X.org developers to oversee its open source effort.
That’s all well and good, but ATI only has about one fifth share of the graphics card market.
Intel and Nvidia equally own 75 percent of the market – and NVidia is not budging.  
“Nvidia, at the time of this writing, is still firmly in the Binary Only camp,” James Bottomley wrote, suggesting this is one factor hindering adoption of the Linux desktop. “Since most experienced Linux users know either to pick Intel [or another card], most of the reported [problems] are coming from less experienced  or even novice users. These users aren’t likely to continue their experiment with Linux; nor will they recommend it to their friends. In fact, they’ve probably turned off Linux for a considerable period of time, if not for life.”
He added that binary drivers have a drag effect on the overall ecosystem . “Fedora was under enormous pressure not to release Fedora 9 until there was a solution that allowed it to run with the Nvidia binary driver. “
Bottomley acknowledged that there is a project underway called Nouveau to reverse engineer an open source driver for Nvidia cards but he urged Nvidia to consider the upside of doing open source drivers. “The most commonly touted feature of the new generation of mobile devices is graphics and multimedia, so anyone with a graphics device strategy that supports Linux seamlessly… is nicely positioned to capitalize on an emerging market.”  The Linux Foundation maintains the vast majority of vendors have released one source drivers and only a few holdouts remain.

May 27th, 2008

We got your microtransactions right here

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:15 am

Categories: General, Google, Internet, Microsoft, Software as a Service, Strategy, business models, content, gaming, mass market

Tags: Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Software As A Service (SaaS), Emerging Technologies, Dana Blankenhorn

Ever since the Web was spun, nearly 15 years ago now, one story has come around, and around, and around like a bad penny.

Microtransactions.

A penny here, a penny there. Buy this story, it’s super-cheap. And of course there are always tales of a mysterious land where it all works.

With the merger of SaaS and cloud computing, the subject has drawn new urgency. And Matt Asay blows by the answer today without even knowing he’s passed it, like a BMW going past a fruit stand.

We got your microtransactions right here:

Anyone wanting to see where software is going need only study the railroad. Or, in Google’s case, the billboards along the side of the road. ;-)

Exactly. Google has very high margins. Google gets very little money from each of your clicks. Sometimes, as when you search for microtransactions at Google, it gets nothing.

So what’s the secret?

For Google it’s infinite inventory. Bandwidth, storage and computing are to all intents free goods. You don’t need to profit from every click to make a lot of money.

For ZDNet and other content sites it’s maximizing the ad revenue for every page view without angering the user so that they click away. (What’s the loss ratio from those full-pagers in front of these blog posts, by the way?)

The problem for Microsoft is that it believes its content, in the form of software, is worth more in a microtransaction world than the pennies-per-click which come from advertising.

Maybe it is, but the key to Microsoft’s success, or failure, will lie in the same balancing act we go through every day here. How much money can you extract from each page, and how much do you really need?

There are SaaS services worth paying for, of course. How many can Microsoft create, and what can it get for them? What happens when someone else does the same thing for free?

Can Microsoft become the low-cost provider when the price is often zero?

This is going to be fun.

April 15th, 2008

My kid hates Linux too! (so what?)

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 11:15 am

Categories: Applications, General, Linux, Linux Desktop OS, Microsoft, Not Linux, education, gaming, mass market

Tags: Linux, Games, UNIX, Operating Systems, Open Source, Software, Personal Technology, Dana Blankenhorn

Christopher Dawson’s admission that his 15 year old hates Linux has drawn quite a blogswarm.

My kid hates Linux too. He’s 16, loves games, and finally stopped whining for a GameCube when he learned his Windows DVDs could also be played online.

Now you can’t get him away from the thing.

If this were sending his grades down the PC would be gone. It’s not.

But for a kid to say he “hates” Linux is simply mistaken, on the kid’s part. If he uses Google, or thousands of other sites, he loves Linux.

What young Mr. Dawson hates is “desktop Linux” and he is right to do so. Most desktop Linux software is applications, serious stuff. Serious as homework.

Game makers have flocked to the Windows platform over the last few years, due to its ubiquity, and their patience has been rewarded.

Of course, being game makers they stress the system, trying to stuff a true game machine experience into a PC operating system. Typical Linux virtualizers won’t run them. In my own son’s case, we had to get him a 750 Gigabyte hard drive just to store his stuff.

Still, what Mr. Dawson is doing, as a high school computer administrator, makes perfect sense. The best way to make certain a school system can only do homework is by making sure that’s all it can do.

Linux is good for that. Homework, that is. Do your homework. Is your homework done?

OK, now you can play.

January 13th, 2008

No coding for young men

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:55 pm

Categories: Development, GPL, General, education, gaming, values

Tags: Fact, Programming, Development Tools, Software Development, Software/Web Development, Dana Blankenhorn

The release of basic SimCity code under GPLv3 is cool, but I wonder about its impact.

I start the questioning by looking into the next room, where my highly intelligent 16 year old son spends his off-hours playing SimCity, its competitors and successors.

Repeated attempts to interest him in programming itself, however, have gone for naught.

This is not just an anecdote. Computer science enrollments have been falling for some time. This has continued despite increasing demand for such graduates in recent years.

When evidence is brought up about increased interest in programming it’s quickly put down with comments from cynics who are certain outsourcing and H1B visas will keep such students poor.

When young people think of programming success, they think of Mark Zuckerberg, or Matt Mullenweg – businessmen and entrepreneurs rather than coders.

The artistic beauty of good programming, efficient coding once known as a “good hack,” is not that important in a world of GHz and GBytes. Even coding accuracy is being automated, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Fact is, coming up with jobs for code is far more important today than actual coding. So is explaining code. The value in software design is rising to higher-and-higher levels of abstraction. Think of it as Moore’s Law in action.

I’m sure the folks releasing the SimCity code hope someone will think of something new it can do, something which might reignite the category. But that’s not coding.

There’s no coding for young men.

This will become an increasingly-important reality going forward. Thus open source is vital not beause it’s free, but because it lets you pull multiple sources of code together quickly, so someone can turn it into what you imagined.

It’s in imagining, not creating, where real value lies.

June 8th, 2007

What is Microsoft really gaining from open source FUD?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:02 am

Categories: Development, IBM, Legal, Microsoft, Patents, Strategy, gaming, management, politics

Tags: Game, Open Source, Microsoft Corp., Dana Blankenhorn

In all the stories about Microsoft’s attack on open source, I have seen little talk about what the company is gaining in all this.

I don’t think it’s money. Despite press reports that companies like Xandros or LG are paying a “Linux tax” to Microsoft, on net dollars don’t seem heading to Redmond.

In the case of LG, Microsoft is gaining access to mobile technology patents. In the case of Xandros, Microsoft is giving its own resellers access to Linux technology. Given that most enterprises run a mix of code, this is no small thing.

Microsoft is also making political gains, as in this piece from our own John Carroll. Statements of support which make open source appear an enemy to specific interests are highly useful when Microsoft faces both antitrust threats and opposition to the whole idea of software patents.

In some parts of the world, there is real fear that Microsoft may succeed, at some point, in gaining an infringement judgement against an open source vendor. This fear can become a thumb on the scale when it comes time to sign a new Microsoft license agreement.

Against all these gains, what are the losses?

• Open source people don’t like Microsoft. That’s news? A lot of people don’t like Paris Hilton, either. Doesn’t seem to faze her.
• Open source developers resist Microsoft code. Again, not news. And if Microsoft developers support both while open source supports just one, that’s a gain in a mixed-source world.
• Governments which support open source may try to embody that support in local laws. Again, this was already happening.

Microsoft is playing a game of Ogre. (Point of pride here. Steve Jackson was my first college newspaper editor. The picture is from a computer version of his game.) As in Steve’s classic game there are two sides, one playing a whole bunch of little pieces and one with just one big piece, Microsoft.

So long as the game remains one against the many, Microsoft has every incentive to keep acting as it does. But if another, equally large, and just as ferocious beast stood up for open source, I believe the game would change in a hurry.

Anyone at IBM read this blog?

April 27th, 2007

Race to Linux draws 600

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:21 am

Categories: Applications, Development, General, Linux, gaming, marketing

Tags: Linux, Application, Dana Blankenhorn

The Race to Linux contest, in which developers try to convert programs from other operating systems to Linux as fast as possible, drew six times the entrants as last year, an estimated 600.

Maybe it was the Nintendo Wii offered as the prize.

Yaacov Cohen, the CEO of Mainsoft, which co-sponsored the contest along with IBM and Novell, said this year's winners were given more complex tasks than last year and were able to use beta versions of Mainsoft's Grasshopper 2.0 for the first time.

Canadian Mark Cafazzo used Grasshopper 2.0 to port a blog starter kit to Linux in just 17 hours. The other winners were Loune Lam, who ported a small business application using Mono, and Christina Dragmir, who created a community map application.  

"We want to show developers they can use the latest, greatest Microsoft technology, like role based security and ASP .Net, and take it cross platform," Cohen explained. "The idea is to have native applications running on Linux with the same qualities as on the Windows environment.

"We are demonstrating a benchmark that we have preserved the performance of the application, once it's ported. It's cross-platform without compromise."

And even if you lose, you get to keep your application.

April 18th, 2007

Can open source save Second Life?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:28 am

Categories: Applications, General, Internet, Software Licensing, Strategy, business models, gaming

Tags:

Second Life has a lot in common with the Internet, with open source, with me. Lots of buzz, lots of fans, not a lot of money coming in. It's a classic business model problem. (That's Larry Lessig at Second Life, from News.Com.)

Will open sourcing the servers change things?

In theory there are many ways in which Linden Labs, which runs Second Life, can benefit from this move.

• Keep doing what they're doing in competition with customers.
• Consult with companies wishing to sell through Second Life.
• Support contracts for open source users.
• Custom programming for Second Life extensions.

The question is whether Linden Labs is geared up to make money at all. Despite the enormous PR buzz, the dollars have not been flying in.

So it's probably worth a shot. What do you think about it?

November 13th, 2006

Why gaming remains proprietary

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:21 am

Categories: Applications, General, Hardware, Linux Desktop OS, gaming, mass market

Tags:

Amid all the applause over Sun's decision on Java the consumer market is going in an entirely different direction.

Two new video game systems are coming to market this week — PS3 and Wii (right) — and both are entirely proprietary.

As client systems game consoles remain an overwhelmingly proprietary island. Early in the decade some thought a Windows PC might be a nifty game system, but that didn't happen. Instead Microsoft entered the fray with its XBox.

Everyone has to make hard choices in the game market. Developers must make hard choices. Consumers must make hard choices. If developer momentum moves to another platform from the one you are using you're stuck.

While some bemoan the waste of old, tossed videogame machines and software, the fact is that PC software also becomes obsolete. I always lost access to some old games when I upgraded hardware, and even if I didn't their primitive graphics and simplistic programming would send them to the trash bin in due course.

Note that a few paragraphs ago I said client systems. Online games run from servers, so they can run Linux. Some online games, like Second Life, have Linux clients. (But is the client any good?)

Online games requiring more than a browser, then, have the same strengths and limitations as Desktop Linux, while those that do just require a browser are as good under Linux as under anything else.

Still, is this good enough? Will Linux advance without gaming? Will desktop Linux ever reach the mass market without gaming? And will we ever see an open source game console?

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