November 23rd, 2009

Tim O'Reilly and the Cassandra act

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:38 am

Categories: Apple, General, Google, Internet, Microsoft, business models, content, mass market, telecom

Tags: ESPN, Web, Tim O'Reilly, Threat, News Corp., Mobile Telephony, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Internet, Channel Management, Marketing

Tim O’Reilly delivered a dire warning at his Web 2.0 Expo over the weekend.

The Web is under threat from closed applications, from Google and Apple to Microsoft and Amazon, and from content vendors like News Corp. building moats and raising high the drawbridges.

I felt great sympathy for Tim, reading his words. I issued similar warnings over the dot-boom, starting from when I launched A-Clue.Com as a weekly newsletter in 1997, having been laid off from CMP’s NetGuide.

Watch out, be wary, I wrote. This Internet commerce thing is just a bubble. It’s going to pop and all will be carnage.

Turns out there is little value in being Cassandra (right, from Wikipedia). When the dot-boom burst, which I date from AOL’s purchase by Time-Warner, it did me no good at all.

I went from having 17 writing gigs to zero. I had joked during the boom that I would gladly write for nothing — in 2002 and 2003 I did. Ha-ha.

The point is that, while I was right, I was powerless to do anything about it.

Tim O’Reilly is not powerless.

And the first thing he needs to do is get straight about the issues.

1. The “threat” from Google and Apple is a feature, not a bug. Mobile telephony has been wholly proprietary from its birth 25 years ago. There is not and never has been a mobile Internet, just whatever data carriers wished to let pass on their networks.
2. It has always been possible to erect paywalls and registration walls. The New England Journal of Medicine and many science journals hide much of their content behind registration. Publishers like England’s The Spectator are constantly trying to get paid.
3. Clouds like those of Amazon and Google may only support software their owners choose to support. Trying to make clouds vanilla discriminates against rocky road and tutti-frutti.

There have been proprietary threats to the Internet practically since the moment the Web was spun. That’s what the browser wars were about. Microsoft was going to add proprietary hooks to Internet Explorer and we’d all be gutted like fish on a line.

Since the Web was spun, there have also been elite audiences, narrow niches for whom payment and registration is a business advantage. Not everyone wants the hoi polloi coming in at all hours so they can spend the next day digging quarters out of the couches. Velvet ropes hold a business model.

So long as I’m not forced to buy News Corp. content, in other words, there is no threat from News Corp. hiding its face from me.

On the other hand, there are real threats O’Reilly didn’t mention. ESPN, for instance.

When ISPs are charged for content, and those ISPs have monopolistic control of their subscribers, that’s a real problem. ESPN has quietly engineered this. Don’t like sports but need a cable modem? You are buying ESPN360 whether you want to or not. Every month some of your ISP bill goes to Disney (ESPN’s owners).

I’m sure News Corp. and every other big content provider would like a taste of that gravy. And it would do little good for subscribers to try and disconnect Comcast en masse — where you gonna go?

It’s the proprietary control of the last mile, and the use of that control to force users into buying things they may not want, that is the big threat to the Internet. That’s a feature of the wireless world, but we can change it. It’s a product of the Bell-cable duopoly, but we can change that, too.

Focus on the real dangers, Tim. You have the power to make change if you focus on what’s real and use your influence.

Otherwise you’re like Holly Hunter in Broadcast News, or hundreds of other working journalists. It must be wonderful to always be right, she’s told.

No, she replies. It’s horrible.

And if you can’t do anything about it, it is.

November 18th, 2009

Where Microsoft is gaining in open source

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:52 am

Categories: GPL, General, Microsoft, Software Licensing

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

The latest Black Duck Software figures on open source license popularity make it clear.

Microsoft is gaining.

(The little black duck shown is copyrighted, trademarked, and has always been protected by Warner Bros., part of the Time-Warner media empire. He’s 72 but carries his age well. And Wikipedia knows his middle name.)

Microsoft licenses are now used on 1 in every 40 open source projects. That’s more than Mozilla. More than Eclipse. More than even the Lesser GPL.

Of course in the greater scheme of things 1 in 40 isn’t all that many. Nearly half of all open source projects are still licensed under the GPL v.2. Microsoft’s open source license market share is still less than half that of GPL v.3. (That’s why the cartoon duck is here rather than Black Duck’s little quacker. Think of GPL v.2 as being Bugs Bunny.)

But we’re talking about growing from a standing start. I’m impressed.

Much credit needs to go here to CodePlex, the Microsoft-sponsored open source site whose Foundation is headed by former Microsoft executive Sam Ramji.

NOTE: Ramji runs the Codeplex Foundation at codeplex.org, which is separate from Microsoft. The main Codeplex site is at codeplex.com.

In our recent interview, Ramji held out the possibility that the Microsoft licenses, and process, could tease a lot more code out of corporate repositories outside the software industry.

So there is room for growth there.

The Black Duck report also indicates there is room for growth in GPL v.3. There are now over 10,000 projects on GPL v.3, with many projects on Sourceforge continuing to switch over.

It’s this competition, between the Microsoft licenses and GPL v.3, that I will enjoy tracking most over the next year. What will you be looking at?

November 18th, 2009

Google-Microsoft rivalry on with ChromeOS launch

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:04 am

Categories: General, Google, Internet, Linux, Linux Desktop OS, Linux Laptop, Microsoft, Strategy, marketing

Tags: Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Web Browser, ChromeOS, Chrome, Linux, Netbooks, Nettops & MIDs, Web Browsers, Operating Systems, UNIX

The daily competition between Google and Microsoft becomes ever-more direct this week, with Google hosting a demo of its ChromeOS tomorrow, right after Microsoft’s Professional Development conference.

ChromeOS is Google’s version of Linux for netbooks, much as Android is its Linux for handhelds. It is a version of Bill Gates’ nightmares from 15 years ago, as Netscape was rising, visions that led directly to the case of U.S. vs. Microsoft.

Microsoft got through that crisis unscathed in a corporate sense, but its image was transformed from that of a user-friendly upstart to that of “an implacable force for evil,” as one comedy show said recently, exemplified by the famous Boardwatch cover of Bill Gates as a member of the Borg, the Star Trek bad guys.

The fear, old programming hands will tell you, was that Netscape would turn its Mozilla browser into a full-fledged operating system that, because of its dominance of the browser space, could beat Windows in the market.

Chrome is a lot like that. It is centered on the browser, which abstracts the complexity of Linux from the user. And it’s designed to load fast, a real Achilles Heel for Windows on a netbook. An early version could be available for download next week.

When you’re paying $300 for your machine, you don’t want to wait 10 minutes for the thing to start, and you don’t want to be paying a lot for your software, either. ChromeOS is designed to fix both problems, so I am looking forward to it.

The hope is that the industry which supports ChromeOS will make up in services what it loses in up-front fees. And Google will be able to tie all its online services to ChromeOS, increasing its market share in areas like Mail where it is not yet dominant.

So, Mr. Bill, is resistance futile?

November 18th, 2009

Competition made Microsoft open source embedded .NET

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:34 am

Categories: BSD, Development, Distributions, General, Microsoft, wireless

Tags: Microsoft Corp., .Net, Application Servers, Linux, Middleware, Internet, Open Source, Software Development, Software/Web Development, Enterprise Software

Regular readers here have probably guessed why Microsoft decided to open source .NET Micro under the Apache 2.0 license.

Competition.

Makers of embedded devices have been moving strongly into open source, especially Linux, and Microsoft was at great risk of being left behind. The announcement was made at the company’s Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles.

The news comes against the backdrop of falling market share for Windows Mobile, and increasing market share for Microsoft open source, as revealed in the latest Black Duck figures. They’re not being nice here, they’re being practical.

Here is how Microsoft community development manager Peter Galli put it on his blog:

The result of this is that the .NET Micro Framework has become a seamless development experience, bringing a single programming model and tool chain for the breadth of developer solutions, all the way from small intelligent devices, to servers and the cloud. There are also no more time-limited versions.

Note that Microsoft is not open sourcing the TCP/IP stack that .NET Micro links to. That’s someone else’s. But the news will let developers create Internet-linked device networks using .NET. It gives Microsoft an in to a technology open source, and Linux, were threatening to run away with.

The handwriting was probably on the wall here years ago, when Linux bought Wind River, and when innovative start-up Cavium bought MontaVista resistance became futile.

It must be noted that software is just a small part of any embedded, Internet-linked solution. It doesn’t mean you’re getting something for nothing, because the chips the software is expressed in are sold as part of larger devices.

It’s all part of a vision I covered early this decade of wireless networks acting as application platforms, using Internet standards to create systems for home automation, medicine and entertainment that are always on and live in the air.

Now Microsoft has a viable play in this game, and this is very good news for .NET developers.

November 13th, 2009

Groklaw suggests Microsoft sue, do over authentication

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:05 am

Categories: General, Government, Legal, Linux, Microsoft, Patents

Tags: Patent, Prior Art, Lawyer, Microsoft Corp., Software Patent, Authentication, Groklaw, Dana Blankenhorn

Microsoft has won a patent that seems to cover an old Unix authentication scheme known as Sudo.

(Your honor, I would like to offer this t-shirt of XKCD’s classic comic as evidence prior art. Mark it as Exhibit A for the defense.)

Groklaw is using the case to argue against software patents, and in favor of the government in the Supreme Court case Bilsky vs. Kappos, in which oral arguments were heard last week.

Advocates of free software have used the case to urge the courts to eliminate software patents, although the appellate court In Re Bilski only limited them. Groklaw may hope the utter bogusity of the sudo patent will prod the Supremes to sing the song their way.

One might also argue, however, that the case argues for better funding at the patent office, and patent examiners with an understanding of prior art.

The Unix version of Sudo (pronounced sue-doo) is freeware. (Red Hat attorneys are probably thinking just that of Microsoft’s lawyers right about now. Oh sue, do.)

The patent describes how Microsoft does Sudo through a program called Runas, but then adds this:

Although the invention has been described in language specific to structural features and/or methodological steps, it is to be understood that the invention defined in the appended claims is not necessarily limited to the specific features or steps described. Rather, the specific features and steps are disclosed as preferred forms of implementing the claimed invention.

This is lawyer speak for Clint Eastwood telling the bad guy, “feeling lucky, punk?” To which Linux lawyers might respond, “Go ahead. Make my day.”

My apologies for the puns. The whole issue makes me feel dirty, Harry.

November 5th, 2009

What would make you trust Microsoft?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:14 am

Categories: General, Microsoft, Strategy, management, marketing

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

In some ways these are the best of times for Microsoft, and open source gets some credit for that.

(I found this charming mashup of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer as Dr. Evil at The Big Deal, a blog by Stefano Buliani.)

Without the competition of open source, I doubt Microsoft’s trend toward bureaucracy could have ever been slowed. Every company goes through its own aging process, and renewal only occurs under pressure.

Open source has strained every muscle Microsoft has — legal, marketing, development, management — but the recession of the last year has brought a turn. Resistance within the open source industry to Microsoft’s entry has gone down. This is easy to see in the writings of our own Matt Asay.

The success of the CodePlex Foundation has given Microsoft another entree into the Fortunate 500. It has allowed Microsoft to be the rabbi of these companies as they approach open source, making strategic code releases and building their own internal communities.

Then there have been Microsoft’s own code releases, which have accelerated since OSI approval of its branded licenses. Plus that sweet, sweet Windows 7 cash.

All in all, a good year. A year of peace and progress. And I can hear you grinding your teeth from here.

Despite all of Microsoft’s actions these last few years, the company remains intensely controversial among open source advocates. For me to write the word Microsoft (Microsoft, Microsoft) here at the open source blog leads to a Pavlovian response.

Actually it leads to two Pavlovian responses. There’s the “Microsoft is evil” response, and a corresponding “Microsoft is not evil” response. And this distrust, this air of controversy, continues to cost Microsoft money.

Microsoft executives still have to walk into open source meetings with shields up, while continuing to protect their bureaucratic flanks within the company. This is easy to see when you hear the smiles on former Microsoft open source executives as they speak from their new gigs. It’s wearing.

Since I began writing this blog, nearly 5 years ago, I have watched Microsoft seek to transform itself from a company that sold code to one that sells the services code provides, and I have watched open source projects see the value in having commercial arms that protect more of their right to make money from copyright.

What I have not seen is any reduction in intensity when I write the word Microsoft, from readers, e-mail correspondents, or the open source people I meet.

Why is that, I wonder. Are all those who hate Microsoft extremists, and will Microsoft ever find happiness in an open source world?

November 4th, 2009

Ramji delivers a CodePlex process

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:23 am

Categories: Development, General, Microsoft, business models, support

Tags: Commons, Microsoft Corp., Ramji, CodePlex, Open Source, Tools & Techniques, Management, Dana Blankenhorn

Successfully pulling code out of a big company can be like pulling the teeth off a lion, without anesthesia.

Sam Ramji (right), the former Microsoft executive who remains President of CodePlex, president of the CodePlex Foundation, which surrounds the Microsoft open source repository, said the key to success is a process.

CodePlex has published a draft of its process, a Project Acceptance Guideline, and is seeking comments from the community on it. The draft describes the advantages of contribution and provides a step-by-step guide for delivering new projects to CodePlex.

Ramji told ZDNet he’s anxious to get community input into the Guideline and will take that input seriously. He wants CodePlex to become a bridge between the open source community and corporate interests.

“How do we solve the problem of corporate contribution to community projects?” he asked. “The barrier is comfort. That comes from a clearly understood process and a well understood mechanism so people see contributing as low risk.”

Ramji said the Codeplex process says “here is how you should contribute in a way that’s sustainable for you and safe for the developer. There should be derivative works with no concerns about patents.”

CodePlex contributions come from software companies and non-industry sources, Ramji said. Software companies learn, through the CodePlex process, which elements of their IP are valuable and which are more valuable in the commons.

Then there are the non-industry contributions.

“Wall Street banks have talked to me over the last few months about contributions they couldn’t get legal clearance on. CodePlex offers a template for how it can get done. We have an organization that can own the copyright, that can accept cash as well as code, and can do the community management.”

In both these cases CodePlex is delivering code to the commons that might not be contributed otherwise, valuable code that can be used to build new applications.

“CodePlex is a lot of my future now,” he said, even though he has left Microsoft to become vice president of strategy at Sonoa Systems, a cloud start-up.

And the work is gratifying. “The Foundation is growing pretty quickly in terms of input from community members and corporate interests.”

October 26th, 2009

Why Android is beating Windows Mobile

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:48 am

Categories: Apple, General, Google, Hardware, Linux Handheld, Microsoft, business models, mass market, mobile

Tags: Google Inc., Microsoft Windows Mobile, Mobile, Apple Inc., Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Corp., Games, Mobile Operating Systems, Advertising & Promotion, Smart Phones

Most analysts have it wrong. It’s not about a balance of power and it’s not about Google becoming what Sun promised to be and it’s certainly not about that dread word free.

It’s about the game that the two companies are playing. Google is playing, and Microsoft is not. (Here, one of the 16 “masterpieces” in the dogs playing poker series, from Wikipedia.)

With Google Android you see where all your competitors start from. You can innovate from there. You can differentiate your phone from other Android phones.

With Microsoft there is less wiggle room. The only people who see the code are Microsoft and (maybe) the manufacturer. You are betting that Microsoft can out-innovate Apple. (Stop laughing.)

No one in the mobile business throught Apple could out-innovate Apple back in the day. Remember when Apple was playing footsie with Motorola? No one in the mobile business thought Apple had what it took to be a “lead dog” — they all wanted it in harness with an unchanging view.

So Apple did its own phone, its own way, and Apple won.

Microsoft lacks the courage to do this. It won’t compete with its own ecosystem. It doesn’t understand that hardware is software. So it plays the game the way Symbian did five years ago, even though Symbian has abandoned that game, so there is no reason to fear Microsoft, and no “there” there.

The days of control are over, unless you’re willing to bet big. Apple did, and wound up playing Monopoly on its own design. What’s Microsoft playing, Blind Man’s Bluff?

By contrast, think of Google as dealing hands of poker.

All the players at the Android table can see one anothers’ cards. Not all the cards, but enough to get a feel for what’s happening. They can keep their aces in the hole, they can innovate or compete in some other way.

The dealer is patient, you can play all day, and guess who ends up with most of the chips at the end of play?

The dealer.

Google is betting that carriers and manufacturers will play enough hands with it that it can gain some market share. Right now that looks like a pretty good bet.

Microsoft is like a gambler with a fistful of dollars that can’t find the game.

October 21st, 2009

Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora Linux updates prepped as Win7 release nears

Posted by Paula Rooney @ 7:37 am

Categories: FOSS, General, Linux Desktop OS, Microsoft

Tags: Ubuntu, Fedora Project, SuSE, IBM Corp., Linux, Open Source, UNIX, Operating Systems, E-mail, Web Browsers

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 19th, 2009

Microsoft breaks Firefox

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:10 am

Categories: Distributions, General, Internet, Microsoft, Network Administration, Not Linux, Security, software appliance

Tags: Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Corp., Web Browsers, Microsoft Windows, Security, Viruses And Worms, Internet, Operating Systems, Software, Dana Blankenhorn

Mozilla vice president for engineering Mike Shaver is being polite about it, but basically Microsoft pushed some software into Firefox last week that left users vulnerable to attack.

(Wise guys might confuse this Three Stooges bit with a recent Microsoft security meeting.)

Windows Presentation Foundation (which those with a sense of humor now call Windows Thepresentation Foundation or WTF), along with .NET Framework 3.5 (which is now OK), were originally pushed as part of Windows in February, and their problems within Windows were fixed in May.

On Tuesday Microsoft pushed a patch to fix the problem within Internet Explorer. So if you’re patching your Microsoft browser your Firefox is safe. Let me repeat that. Microsoft insists its MS09-054 patch made even Firefox users safe.

But if you’re not following Microsoft directions then WTF you may now be vulnerable to exploit. So Mozilla told Microsoft it would “blocklist” both WTF and the .NET Framework, backing off on the latter after discussions with Microsoft.

The WTF plug-in supports an XML-based user interface called XBAP, and lets its XAML applications run. But the technology was vulnerable to a “drive-by” exploit, in which your hitting a specific Web page would download malware.

I’m reading a lot of blog posts calling this deliberate, even malicious. I don’t think it is. I suspect Microsoft is confusing its convenience with users’ security desires, rationalizing that this power lets it fix security holes automatically.

But its technology makes Microsoft the potential source of great big security holes, which can leave it with egg on its collective face. The kindest thing one can say is that this is vaudeville comedy. Others will call it burlesque or, perhaps, a horror show.

What’s your view?

October 9th, 2009

The best protection for software assets

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 11:39 am

Categories: Government, Legal, Microsoft, Patents, management, marketing

Tags: Asset, Software, Patent, Microsoft Corp., Roberto Galoppini, Tools & Techniques, Open Source, Management, Dana Blankenhorn

Roberto Galoppini has an interesting piece running today on Codeplex, and how to improve it.

I can’t say much more than “attaboy” about it, but he ends with an interesting comment:

Software patents are not legal here in Europe, and Europe uses a lot of open source software.

As a commenter here wrote earlier today, much of the controversy surrounding open source involves patents, which he calls the “Fight Club” of software. (That’s what Brad Pitt is doing here.)

Without the argument over patents, what would Microsoft be doing that was controversial regarding open source? Some of its licenses are one-sided, but so are its contributions to the code protected by those licenses. The MS-PL license is also OSI-approved.

One point I have made many times — as have people much wiser than I am — is that patent protection isn’t that great a deal. You have to reveal your invention. The rights don’t last that long.

Contrast this with copyright and trademark. This story, and the logo above it, will have legal protection long after Microsoft’s so-called Linux “patents” are forgotten.

When people “pay” for software, what are they really buying? Support. They want to know needed updates will come in, that someone is back there stamping out bugs, protecting us from bad guys, and enhancing the code.

We convey this information through a trademark, not patents.

The difference between open source and proprietary software is visibility, nothing more. Why am I signing a contract for software I can see? To acknowledge your copyright on it, not your patent rights.

All the controversy between Microsoft and open source would be over if the Supreme Court followed Red Hat’s recent brief in the Bilski case, and stripped out rights previous courts had given software companies, rights that have proven to be little but trouble, protecting only monopoly and not innovation.

Perhaps Microsoft might add an “amen” to that brief. Can I hear an amen?

October 9th, 2009

Seeking a Stallman for open source

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:50 am

Categories: FOSS, General, Microsoft, management

Tags: Richard Stallman, FLOSS, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

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?

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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 28th, 2009

I for one welcome no overlords

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:05 am

Categories: Development, FOSS, GPL, General, Microsoft, values

Tags: Software, Microsoft Corp., Richard Stallman, F/OSS, Open Source, Tools & Techniques, Management, Dana Blankenhorn

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 15th, 2009

OIN suggests patent reform on the fly

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 11:41 am

Categories: General, Legal, Linux, Microsoft, Patents

Tags: Patent, OIN, Dana Blankenhorn

Open Innovation Network (OIN) CEO Keith Bergelt enjoyed my recent analogy of his work to that of a bomb disposal team. He also liked Paula’s story.

But his motive for talking was to push the story forward, and to say that the Obama Administration is going to give us patent reform on-the-fly. He said we can be a part of it.

Yes, we can, because the new Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property is David Kappos.

Besides having a nice hair line (so much like my own) Kappos “gets it.” He came to the government from IBM. IBM is a co-founder of OIN.

You can help through a group OIN calls Linux Defenders. Here is how:

1. Peer to patent, examining newly published patent applications to identify prior art and lead to the applications being rejected.
2. Post issue peer to patent, identifying poor quality patents held by trolls OIN can crowd-source prior art on, leading to re-hearings.
3. Defensive publications, writing up inventions as prior art for posting on ip.com, a database patent examiners will look at.

“We want to develop more rigor about codifying what we know so others can’t invent around what we already know. Patent only those things that are truly unique and wrap them with defensive publications.”

Kappos fits in because his mantra is patent quality. “You can’t have overly broad patents issued. This will change what the industry does, the interpretation of the legislation, and what is happening in courts.”

There’s a warning here, however. “We have to meet that change halfway and if we don’t mobilize the community we’re contributing to the negative future we want to avoid.”

About the earlier stories. I was right. The company that bought the patents from Microsoft and passed them to OIN, called AST, is a “white hat” in the patent litigation game. But it’s a white hat of a particular type. It buys patents for its owners, licenses them for those owners, then releases them into the wild.

Paula was right, too. Microsoft packaged the 22 patents to make them tasty for trolls, offering hints on who to sue and how. It also pointedly did not offer the portfolio to OIN, the biggest player in the market.

This is the game Microsoft played, Bergelt thinks. “If you are looking for the most elegant way of putting time and distance from the sale and repercussions of a sale directly to a troll, sell to a good guy who releases to the market rather than selling directly to trolls.”

Fortunately, in this case, AST and OIN worked together. Problem solved.

Those days could end, but it will take work. The patent office can’t do this alone. With your help, however, it’s finally willing to move in the way Linux wants.

September 14th, 2009

Open source loves profit

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 11:50 am

Categories: Development, FOSS, GPL, General, Microsoft, Oracle, Strategy, business models, values

Tags: Software, Marc, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

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 11th, 2009

Will Microsoft always be seen as open source Astroturf?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:03 am

Categories: Development, General, Microsoft, Strategy, management, values

Tags: Group, Microsoft Corp., Matt Asay, Linux Foundation, Linux, Taxes, Open Source, Free Trade, Personal Finance, Operating Systems

There’s an old game in politics. If some group is giving you trouble, launch a competing group under your control.

Bar Association won’t approve your judges? Launch your own lawyers’ group. Feminists giving you trouble? Create a group of “real feminists” spouting your talking points.

These are the origins of Astroturf, a popular term in current political debates denoting phony grassroots, people who claim to be angry from the bottom up but are controlled from the top down.

(Are you ready for some football? My local team, the Atlanta Falcons, plays all their home games on the fake grass of the Georgia Dome. This weekend they’ll be tangled up in blue…)

Now before you go all political on me my question is whether we’ll ever see Microsoft as meaning anything but Astroturf in open source.

This week Microsoft is putting a cool $1 million into its new CodePlex Foundation. It’s a valedictory of sorts for director of platform strategy Sam Ramji, who has given his notice. Matt Asay thinks Ramji was da bomb, and suggests his replacement should be a diplomat, not a bomb thrower. (Just pass them your resume.)

The Foundation is organized under the tax law as a 501(c)6 organization. Sounds a lot like charities organized under 501(c)3, but it’s the designation given to business groups like chambers of commerce. The Linux Foundation is also a 501(c)6, while GNOME is a 501(c)3.

Fact is I can almost smell and taste the press releases sure to follow from groups like the Linux Foundation, the FSF, and Software Freedom. It’s phony, it’s an attempt to deceive, Microsoft will always see open source as captive to its interests.

Or to quote the philosopher Joe Wilson, you lie.

But do they?

September 9th, 2009

OIN outmanuevers Microsoft, buys Linux patents

Posted by Paula Rooney @ 8:13 am

Categories: FOSS, GPL, General, IBM, Legal, Linux, Microsoft, Patents, Red Hat

Tags: Patent, Microsoft Corp., Patent Troll, Open Invention Network, OIN, Linux, UNIX, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software

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 8th, 2009

OIN disposal squad takes out 22 patent land mines

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:24 pm

Categories: General, Legal, Linux, Microsoft, Patents

Tags: Patent, Microsoft Corp., Open Invention Network, Dana Blankenhorn

The Open Invention Network has taken out 22 more patent land mines, buying them from an outfit called Allied Security Trust which in turn had bought them from Microsoft.

CEO Keith Bergelt hinted to a reporter that Microsoft was not interested in selling to OIN, but the group’s press release on the matter gives no hint of that.

AST bought the patents from Microsoft in July. It is headed by Daniel McCurdy, who also runs Patent Freedom, whose mission is “to help operating companies and their advisors more effectively assess, respond to, and ultimately reduce the specific threats” posed by non-practicing entities, sometimes called patent trolls.

Even if Microsoft did not know the patents would land with OIN, it seems clear they would know the organization they were selling to had no interest in holding anyone else up with them.

ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley reported that most of the patents were part of the package of 3D technology patents Silicon Graphics sold to Microsoft in 2002.

Given that, it’s possible that the patents may allow companies or groups to create more realistic 3D games using open source.

On learning of the transaction a few hours ago, I scratched my head searching for the proper analogy. I finally came up the recent movie The Hurt Locker, coming soon to DVD, about a bomb disposal unit working in Iraq.

What OIN does is delicate work, and dreadfully important. But as it is with land mines so it is with patents. In the time it takes to neutralize a few, hundreds more may be planted.

It’s an arms race that can’t be won. The only answer is to lay no more mines, or in this case to reform the patent laws so math, or software concepts, is no longer subject to ambush.

September 1st, 2009

Microsoft lover Citrix as heroine of the open source cloud

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:00 am

Categories: Cloud Computing, Distributions, General, Microsoft, Strategy, marketing, virtualization

Tags: Citrix Systems Inc., VMware Inc., Microsoft Corp., Open Source, Virtualization, Hardware, Dana Blankenhorn

Five days after joining its friend Microsoft in walking away from rival VMWorld’s virtualization show, Citrix is portraying itself as the best friend of open source ever with the launch of the Xen Cloud Platform, an open source alternative to VMWare’s vCloud service.

The announcement was linked to Xen.org, the open source project Citrix has sponsored since acquiring Xensource in 2007.

The folks at Forrester call this a bold move, with Linux as its domain 0, a move toward greater cloud compatibility.

The political machinations here are complex. Maintain compatibility with VMWare and deploy your own open source cloud by aligning with an outfit Microsoft was said to be be ready to buy a year ago. (Our own Jason Perlow was among those asking the question, as shown at right.)

In fact the Citrix-Microsoft relationship has always been rather fraught, with analysts like Brian Madden asking who is controlling who.

So now both Citrix and Microsoft are acting like gate-crashers at VMWare’s party, claiming their solution is simpler than VMWare’s own vCenter suite. Oh, and more open source centric.

Can anyone out there relieve this headache I’m getting? I am certain a lover of soap operas can explain it. Meanwhile my question is, where does the interest of open source really lie in all this?