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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: BSD
November 18th, 2009
Competition made Microsoft open source embedded .NET
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.
July 16th, 2009
Why Apache is not the bottom of the open source incline
Matt Asay is beginning to remind me of those people who, in the wake of 9-11 or Hurricane Katrina, found themselves questioning their political assumptions and switched sides.
Recessions are hard. Deep recessions are harder. The current recession is not sparing the open source movement. Money and partnerships are harder to come by.
So why, Matt asks, is the GPL still considered the bottom of the open source incline, and not, say, the Apache license?
Then, despite high praise for Eric Raymond and disquiet toward Richard Stallman, he pretty much answers his own question.
Did Stallman simply create an alternative way to release proprietary software?
Well, yes.
Any code you write is proprietary to you. No matter its license, you feel a proprietary interest in it. You may want contributions from others, but you also want protection for your rights as an author. You don’t want someone going around behind your back and turning your open source code proprietary with a tweak here and some marketing there. You want your interest in improvements protected.
If this is your attitude, an attitude both common and natural, then you will likely prefer the GPL to Apache licensing. Under the GPL your interest in getting improvements is protected. The power of others to fork your code and turn it to their profit is limited.
The equation draws a different result if you are a corporation, a group of people with marketing and support, releasing productized code. The code base you are releasing is likely larger and your infrastructure offers protection against rogue competition.
That is why corporate projects are often released under some type of BSD license. Google likes Apache. IBM likes Eclipse. These licenses protect corporate rights well, while the GPL’s focus is on individual rights.
Communities, however, generally consist of individuals, not corporations. If you truly want individual contributions, your best chance of getting them comes if you and they are on the same legal footing, and the same practical footing, regarding the code base. You want the GPL.
When businesses organize, with scaled contributions coming from what are essentially development partners, the protections of an Apache license make better sense. Apache offers better protection to corporate business models than the GPL.
My guess is Matt’s change of heart on these questions has much to do with his job at a corporation, one with infrastructure, marketing, and support functions that need regular feeding from license fees or something, in order to survive.
The size of a corporate code base, the work needed to maintain and support it, may make the protections of the GPL seem redundant, while those of the Apache license attractive.
But the bottom of the open source incline will be where individuals live, not corporations, and that’s where you will always find the GPL.
July 1st, 2009
Is the GPL losing its grip?
In the latest Black Duck analysis of open source licensing trends, it appears on the surface that the GPL has lost significant market share.
That is, until you look inside the numbers.
Versions of the GPL are currently being used by 65% of all projects, down from about 70% a year ago, with V3 licensing now on track to become the fourth most-widely used license by the end of the year.
The only non-GPL licenses to attract significant usage are the Artistic License and the standard BSD. But the GPV v3 should, at its present rate of growth, pass the latter in share within six months, the report says. Over half of all projects are still licensed under GPL v2.
The Artistic License, originally credited to Larry Wall, is the only open source license to have gone through a successful court challenge, specifically that of Jacobsen v. Katzer, where a district court is still considering an SFLC request for injunctive relief.
The best-known project under the Artistic License is Perl, but that project is dual-licensed under the GPL. There are also multiple versions of the Artistic License — Version 1.0, Version 2.0, and clarified. The Black Duck project did not break them out.
Black Duck’s analysis of its own figures, however, is that “open core” licensing is on the rise and that open source licensing is becoming more diverse, less “restrictive.”
So is the GPL losing its grip as the dominant open source license? I don’t think so but I can be persuaded.
May 20th, 2009
Can open source refuse to do business?
Let’s pretend I am an open source developer and I don’t like you.
I have control of some important open source project, so I write an addendum to the license forbidding you, or your institution, from using it.
Now not only are you not allowed to download my stuff, but you can’t update anything containing my stuff.
That’s what Bruno Lowagie of Ghent is doing. He is engaged in a legal dispute with Belgian authorities over taxes on his AdSense ads. So he is writing a “Belgian Restriction” into his next license, forbidding the government from using the next version of his program, iText.
If this were just one program there might be little problem. But iText, which is used to manipulate PDF, RTF, and HTML files in Java, is also embedded in a host of other open source products, including Eclipse BIRT, Jasper Reports, Red Hat JBoss Seam, and Windward Reports.
In theory, the next time some Belgian bureaucrat tries to upgrade one of these other products they will be in violation of Lowagie’s new license. Unless they want to settle the tax question.
So, on to the questions:
- Is this legal?
- Is this violating the spirit of open source?
- Am I really reading a story about Belgium?
Loading ...April 29th, 2009
Benchmark shows Eucalyptus the money
Want to build your own Amazon cloud?
Now you can, with support from a commercial outfit that developed the underlying software at UC Santa Barbara.
Eucalyptus Systems has opened its virtual doors after getting a $5.5 million infusion of venture capital from a group headed by Benchmark Capital.
The name is, believe it or not, an acronym. It stands for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems. The fact that the latest version of Ubuntu Server is a koala bear is, I’m certain, purely coincidental.
The new company is headed by a former real estate man, Woody Rollins, who is based in Santa Barbara, along with Eucalyptus developer Rich Wolski as CTO.
The move follow Eucalyptus being made part of Ubuntu Server, but it will certainly help spur enterprise acceptance of cloud computing, and could also help reinforce Amazon’s APIs as leaders in the space. The software is available under the simplified BSD license.
Speaking of which, I will note to readers that, much like our own Matt Asay, my own thoughts on some key questions have evolved over time.
I now understand the importance of a project having a commercial arm, even if the software emerges from a community or academe, in order for it to grow.
So if he wants to put a picture of Arlen Specter adjacent to his next mention of me, it’s a fair cop.
April 29th, 2009
Apache or GPL?
Matt Asay today switched his license alliegiance, to Apache from the GPL.
Before anyone starts in with the Arlen Specter jokes, let me say that based on the criteria he sets out, adoption, his argument makes sense. (I also think Matt is better-looking than Specter, at right, from his own Web site, no matter what party you belong to.)
Once an open source product is released into the market, users don’t really care what license it uses.
If you are looking to businesses to fund further development, a good argument can be made for Apache or even the Eclipse license. Google likes Apache, IBM Eclipse, and your user-in-the-street could probably care less.
What counts on this question for me is not adoption but development.
If your company wants to release its own code, and control that code, if open source is mainly a marketing concept to you, then a BSD license such as Apache or Eclipse makes perfect sense.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for a community to extend your code, to build your code, and to defend your code with their bug fixes and forum support, then the GPL works best.
Communities develop best where rights and responsibilities are equal. But business and democracy are two different things. Business exists to exploit code for profit. Communities seek to exploit code for the shared benefit of all.
I think it’s possible that, over the last few years, many companies confused corporate projects with community projects. They made noises about community support, and supporting the community, but they were really in it for themselves, this was obvious to everyone, and besides their code wasn’t terribly exciting to anyone other than business allies.
On the other hand many companies have proven you can make a lot of money from the GPL. If you’re willing to really embrace the community you create, to nurture that community, and to take no more from the community than the community feels is your due.
Some are finding that a rather big if. It is this if that caused the open source movement to break away from Stallman and his FOSS advocates a decade ago. And that basic, ideological divide remains.
To my way of thinking Matt just figured out which side he was on all along.
April 23rd, 2009
Another term for open source
Democratic software.
Open source is the democratic process applied to software, just as Wikipedia is the same process applied to the collection of information.
(Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedom paintings, including Freedom of Speech to the right, were originally created to sell War Bonds during World War II. From the National Archives.)
A proprietary software model is more like China. Only the leaders get to know what is going on in the code. The company is like the Communist Party, and you’re only in on the change process if you’re inside.
By contrast open source offers true democracy, more like that of a Vermont town meeting than the U.S. Congress. Everyone has a voice. Everyone can see the code, edit the code, fix the code. Official changes go through an official process, but that process too is open and transparent.
Some may think my pitching open source as democratic software and proprietary software as autocratic software is some kind of public relations exercise.
They would be right. But open source itself was created as a PR move, in reaction to the dogmatism of the FOSS movement.
One point I have to make about open source again-and-again is that the term was created as a reaction against the concept of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) pushed by people like Richard Stallman, whose freedoms included one to gain improvements from the community.
Entering into the community through a license like the GPL gave equal rights to all, but some felt it placed unequal responsibilities on some, namely those who contributed the biggest improvements to the code base and who might want to profit from that knowledge.
They were looking at the GPL through an economist’s eyes. They wanted a meritocracy. They wanted entrepreneurs and free enterprise to gain a seat at the table, to drive the software forward.
The roots of this understanding can be seen in licenses like the BSD License, the Apache License, and the Eclipse License. While the GPL is still the leading open source license its roots lie in FOSS, not open source.
To people like Eric Raymond, sharing did not work as an economic model, even though the GPL turns out to be the best way for business to get maximum input from the community for open source software.
But visible code, and whether it’s BSD or GPL all open source code is visible, is inherently democratic. So why not just call open source democratic software?
April 22nd, 2009
Apache releases new version of OFBiz
Leading open source project groups like Apache have a reputation for delivering products that are cool for geeks to play with but lack competitiveness as business tools.
This is not true. Apache’s latest proof comes in Version 9.4 of its OFBiz project, which standards for Open For Business. (The POS terminal software is based on XUI, right)
The OFBiz project includes many functions well-known to fans of such open source companies as SugarCRM, Compiere, and Magento. Red Hat is among the industry leaders which also has an ecommerce suite.
OFBiz goes well beyond the Red Hat offering, which is basically a Linux stack with a database and Apache Web server. It includes:
- catalog management
- pricing management
- order management
- customer management
- warehouse management
- fulfillment
- accounting
- work effort management
- content management
- a Point Of Sales (POS) module
That’s a lot of stuff. It’s highly commercial, and there is a very group of company building commercial products based on it,
And this is not just for small stores. Serious companies like 1-800-Flowers and Isotoner are OFBiz users, thus part of its community.
All of which leads to this question.
If businesses are really strapped for cash, and successful businesses are being run on open source tools, why aren’t more companies using OFBiz?
I’m thinking they could really use a SaaS version…
April 17th, 2009
Common public license merged into Eclipse
I have written here often of license proliferation, and along the way have been overly snarky toward Michael Tiemann of Red Hat and the Open Source Initiative, as the number of licenses kept growing even after he held up his hand to say stop.
So it is only fair here to mention a success story, and to give credit where it is due.
The Common Public License has been merged into Eclipse.
An FAQ on the merger notes that the two licenses were already very similar. “A quick read of the two licenses will quickly show that they are very very close,” writes Mike Milinkovich, who heads Eclipse.
Our own Ed Burnette called Milinkovich “director for life” in his post on this, proving that I’m not the only snarky one at ZDNet. At minimum Mike wants the chance to take the Madden way out.
What this illustrates is an important lesson in fighting license proliferation. It takes two to negotiate any solution. And this is not something the OSI can do all by itself.
It takes a village and a negotiator.
April 3rd, 2009
The false contradiction within open source
While showing admirable concern for his own interests, Matt Asay misses an essential point about open source this morning.
He spots what he considers a contradiction within open source, a conflict between open source purity and the requirements of the market. It’s a theme he discussed openly at OSBC.
Here is my problem with that. There is, in fact, no contradiction.
The reason the GPL is our dominant open source license, despite what seem to be onorous terms, is that it works best for most businesses.
Requiring that improvements be given back, what Richard Stallman might call the “fourth freedom” in open source, what distinguishes open source from his own FOSS concept, is in fact a freedom and not a burden.
Matt references his concerns that “open source is its own worst enemy” to a taxonomy of openness at Open Gardens, but I’ve been talking about it since before my 2006 post about the Open Source Incline.
Various license offshoots of the BSD family tree, whether Eclipse (beloved of IBM) or Apache (hearted by Google) or Microsoft’s various licenses, are one-sided because those companies put so much work into the projects they sponsor.
The relative contributions of the communities and the sponsors are unequal, and will likely remain so.
If you want the codebase you built to grow, go with the GPL.
That is the real problem with projects by small companies that don’t seem to grow. However you spin it or tweak it, you get the most help from others when you give the most gracefully in your turn.
The love you take is equal to the love you make. It’s not just for hippies anymore. It’s good business.
Embracing what seems contradictory is hard, I know, but following the code instead of the money actually leads to more money in the long run than just following the money.
March 17th, 2009
Could Cloudera become the open source Asia?
Those of you old enough to remember the original Apple Macintosh may also remember the “super-group” known as Asia.
The group became notorious for its ego battles, forming, breaking up, and reforming until it became something of a joke. (To the right is the present line-up for “the original Asia” — Geoff Downs, John Wetton, Carl Palmer and Steve Howe.)
Point is, Cloudera is similarly endowed with talent. Who is in charge?
- Is it Michael Olson, formerly of Oracle and (before that) Sleepycat Softaware?
- Is it Amr Awadallah, founder of Vivasmart, who called Cloudera “my start-up” on his blog last year?
- How about Jeff Hammerbacher, who led the Facebook database team and was most recently “entrepreneur in residence” at Accel Partners, which is funding this thing?
- How about Chris Bisciglia, who created Google’s cloud computing initiative and probably knows more about Hadoop — the project being commercialized here – than anyone?
- Or could it be Marten Mickos, the mySQL founder who helped fund the new company and knows more about how to spin open source into a billion dollars than just about anyone?
This is important because the underlying technology, MapReduce, is the real force behind Google’s success in finding you a Chinese restaurant three blocks from your house faster than you can say moo goo gai pan.
On the company’s blog Bisciglia has the two most recent entries — one announcing the Cloudera distribution of Hadoop and one announcing Hadoop training. But maybe the rest think blogging is beneath them.
Awadallah’s blog has basically gone silent of late. Olson was spotted recently in Europe. Hammerbacher’s last major contribution to the Cloudera blog is dated October. So whose songs go on the album, who talks to the press, and who interfaces with the label (uh, venture capitalists)?
Beyond the snark there is an important point here. Every successful company I know of is entrepreneurial, with one entrepreneur. Often there’s an “inside” guy and an “outside” guy — it’s the latter you have heard of, but the former who makes the trains run on time.
But no more than that. Think of a successful company as being more like Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. The musicians are all great, but they all know who The Boss is.
There is a lot to be excited about here, but open source has been around long enough that it has lots of stars, lots of egos, and a successful start-up is generally ego-free.
There’s also this. If Cloudera breaks up, those whose vision is rejected could just fork Hadoop and come out with their own distribution.
Which brings me back to the original analogy — have you checked out Asia Featuring John Payne?
March 10th, 2009
IBM, Microsoft and open source citizenship
Matt Asay has offered a rather strange post noting that if history had been different the roles of IBM and Microsoft would be reversed.
If history were different I’d be George Clooney. It’s not. This is Clooney’s good fortune.
Matt’s point is that, in future work, Microsoft might find itself contributing to projects like Apache while IBM might feel threatened by things like a project to build a mainframe.
Maybe. But when was the last time IBM sued an open source vendor or even threatened to do so?
This is not because IBM is good or Microsoft is bad. It’s just not in IBM’s corporate best interests to do so, nor is it likely to be in the future. Because IBM has transformed its business models to accommodate, even encourage, open source.
IBM is a hardware company, a services company and a contracting company. Notice what is missing? Any need to control code used by anyone but a customer IBM has contracted to serve.
For IBM, software is a shared store from which it benefits, and to which it contributes. The company has built an arms-length relationship with the whole process of improving code. It can still make proprietary improvements, because the BSD-type licenses it supports allow that.
The point is that IBM’s freedom to act is no impeded by open source.
What Matt fears is a shared decision by a code project to target IBM products, but why would a truly shared effort turn on one of the members? When there are other productive directions to go in?
By placing its relationship with code at arms-length, IBM has created a situation where it can be both a solid open source citizen and a profitable enterprise.
It took IBM years of wrenching change to get to this place. In proprietary software Microsoft long ago buried IBM the way Nixon buried George McGovern. Now IBM is benefitting from its hard work of transformation, while Microsoft continues on the same path that has worked for it before.
The only way I think Microsoft can become as good an open source citizen as IBM is to make the same changes in how it approaches software. Microsoft fans are now asking, “to what benefit?”
Exactly. Open source citizenship is not a mask. It’s corporate character in action.
February 24th, 2009
Ingres-Alfresco get into ring with Microsoft SharePoint
Our own Matt Asay can’t talk about this (he’s an executive with one of the players) but Ingres and Alfresco think they can build a real competitor to SharePoint. (The original image lives at Wikimedia.)
Matt has been writing about SharePoint “lock-in” for years. Partnering with Ingres, which prides itself on a truly enterprise class open source database (it’s based on PostgreSQL), gives it a leg up on competing.
Ingres currently offers an installation bundle for both its database and the Alfresco ECM (Enterprise Content Manager). The bundle contains the Alfresco 2.1 and the Ingres 2006 Release 3 community editions.
The new offering is what is called a “software appliance” combining the two capabilities, up to date and enterprise ready, supported by Ingres for $32,500 per supported server.
The market is fairly limited. The Alfresco ECM already supports Office. If you buy Matt’s fear of SharePoint lock-in, and you have an Alfresco license, you may already be good to go.
It’s the database fans who should prick up their ears. Ingres is not only seeking to keep you out of Microsoft’s clutches here but make sure you don’t get into Sun’s, owners of mySQL. Getting into your pocket through content management is the play.
So you can have a big boy database and big boy content management with Office-compatible files, without becoming one with the Microsoft borg. With open source.
February 24th, 2009
Red Hat virtualization friend of the little guy
In the Coen Brothers classic Oh Brother, Where Art Thou, villain Homer Stokes (right) portrays himself as the “friend of the little guy.”
By this his constituency thinks he means them. In fact it means the midget working the crowds with him.
Red Hat is doing something like this with virtualization, albeit with no malice and (spoiler alert) without suffering Stokes’ downfall.
The little guys in this case are KVM and Qumranet. The savvy will note Red Hat bought Qumranet last September. Around the same time it embraced KVM, which Qumranet supports.
The truly savvy will note that KVM stands for “Kernel Virtual Machine,” which puts the whole Linux kernel in its Domain 0, where what a hypervisor can do is defined.
Forget the movie a moment. It makes all sorts of sense for an enterprise Linux vendor to seek to define what a virtualization system supports as anything Linux does.
Trouble is logical and makes sense aren’t the same as done in the world of code, any more than they are in movie analogies.
The news this week is Red Hat’s full virtualization strategy, in which it will take customers off their Xen environments (in favor of KVM), deliver virtualization managers on servers and desktops, and offer a standalone hypervisor, all within the next 18 months.
Intel and IBM seem on board with this strategy, based on the press release. You might think of them as stand-ins for Vernon T. Waldrip, played in the film by Roy McKinnon. They’re suitors. They’re bona fide. (I suspect you’re giving me the John Turturro role. He got turned into a toad.)
And you, dear customer, are Penny in this analogy. She’s played in the film by Holly Hunter, currently portraying a self-destructive police detective in TNT’s Saving Grace. But you don’t want to go down that rabbit hole.
Let’s stick to cases. Our friends at Forrester think this could be a powerful combination, depending on how much Linux application support Red Hat can squeeze into 64 Megabytes of code.
That embedded hypervisor is due in May. At which point we’ll start to see how this real-life script goes.
For now we’ll just ask, on behalf of Red Hat and Homer, “is you is or is you ain’t my constituency?”
February 4th, 2009
Can open source save the mobile market?
The mobile market has a big problem.
Despite endless hype, the iPhone, Android, Blackberry e-mail and all the rest, data still represents less than 5% of the market.
Today’s question is whether open source can change that. My inbox is filled with notes from vendors and others claiming yes we can:
- Microsoft is now widely expected to be running NetBSD on the next version of its Sidekick mobile device.
- Volantis says its GPL’ed Mobility Server supports 5,700 devices and can link them to Web 2.0 services like Picasa, Flickr and Google Docs.
- Students at RPI have an open source iPhone application that lets you track your personal finance.
I am assuming this is just the tip of a large iceberg. Open source developers are doing all they can to open up cellular phones to the world of data.
The problems remain the phones and the data plans. Can you imagine running Volantis services on a Razr? And how many consumers can afford to add true Internet data to their mobile subscriptions — broadband plans cost $70-90/month and are not all-in or even all-accessible.
The best thing open source brings to mobility is a dose of competition. Contrary to those who think open source is socialism, open source application vendors compete fiercely, and with high levels of imagination, to bring new capabilities to market and spin some money from them.
It’s all about carrier lock-in. So long as phones and services are tied to specific carriers there is an enormous consumer risk in trying anything. And in the present economic environment it doesn’t take much risk to turn maybe into a negative shake of the head.
What unlicensed systems like WiFi really have going for them is they deliver real Internet service — no gatekeepers, no special requirements. If the Obama stimulus program is to do anything for the mobile Internet it needs to tear down those walls.
The President should ask why that device in his pocket can’t do anything but e-mail.
January 29th, 2009
Microsoft makes a real open source move
Whenever Microsoft does something involving open source, look at the fine print.
Sometimes it’s under a bogus unapproved license written by Microsoft lawyers. Sometimes it’s under a Microsoft license its lawyers got through the OSI, after much wailing-and-gnashing-of-teeth.
But this is the real deal. This is Apache 2.0 licensing.
And this is pretty cool code, too.
Specifically we’re talking about Web Sandbox, which aims at securing Web content through virtualization. OK, that’s not a cool thing, but wait.
As Ray Valdes of Gartner Group has noted, this can also protect against cross-site scripting, an increasingly common attack of hackers against Web sites of all types. So it is a cool thing.
It’s a framework that works under Javascript, requires no plug-ins, and offers consistent support for Web objects, writes Peter Galli. He also notes that Microsoft is a sponsor of Apache and Sam Ramji delivered the keynote at their last conference.
If this move is followed up by others along the Apache line it will be a very good thing. It would not help my traffic if Microsoft becomes a non-controversial word in the open source community, but it will help open source.
January 27th, 2009
How much should government commit to open source?
The debate on open source in government has shifted.
It’s no longer a question of whether, but how much.
We even have Jack Wallen of TechRepublic worrying about the health of Microsoft, should the government make a wholesale switch.
Of course it’s not Microsoft he should be worrying about. It’s Oracle. Let me explain.
For government open source is not just a change in license or business models. It is a cultural change.
Most agencies, like the military, see software as a good like any other, something you buy as part of a contract designed to perform a function.
Open source does not work that way. When a scaled enterprise adopts open source it becomes responsible for the code.
When you buy packaged software, in other words, you sign a tech support contract. When you commit to open source you hire contract programmers.
With code control comes responsibility. Enterprises which adopt open source understand this. They may buy support, but they also commit their own staffs to maintaining and enhancing the code base. Under the GPL and you will contribute these additions back to the community. Under a BSD license you’re not under that obligation.
In either case you’re acquiring code. It’s no longer like buying a car. It’s more like adopting a child.
If government is going to make a major effort in open source it has to hire some folks. The age of contracts and privitization let government pretend that extending its reach did not require this responsibility.
A move toward open source will reinforce it.
January 19th, 2009
Some Linux backers upset about selection of Silverlight to stream Obama inauguration events
While Microsoft cheers the selection of Silverlight for streaming the Obama inauguration events this week, some are upset that the Linux desktop is not a supported operating system.
Microsoft’s cross platform Silverlight browser plug in supports Windows and Macintosh. The Mono project’s Moonlight 1.0 — an implementation of Silverlight for the Linux desktop, and the only open source version — is in beta testing but the final code won’t be released for several weeks. Moonlight 2.0, which incorporates many of the Silverlight 2.0 featutes, won’t be out until late 2009.
Mono project chief and Novell vice president Miguel de Icaza said there might be a workaround — but it’s not certain.
“I tried looking up the player on the Obama web site, and I guess the player has not been made public so I have no way of testing. The streaming and media codecs should be compatible with Moonlight 1.0, but the “chrome” used to paint the player might be a 2.0 app,” de Icaza wrote in an email response to ZDnet blogger questions. “If people compile Moonlight from SVN, they can get our 2.0 support that might be enough to work with this, but we have not officially released that yet.”
Microsoft touts its Silverlight as an open source offering — the source code is available on CodePlex — but the license under which it is distributed is not open source.
One very upset open source backer posted his view on Slashdot over the weekend, and criticized the Presidential Inauguration Committee for not being inclusive.
As there is no working Silverlight 2 capable alternative on these systems, everyone running Mac PPC, Linux and FreeBSD has been left out,” the Slashdot reader wrote. “Should the president of USA use [and/or] sponsor a convicted [monopolist's] not-so-popular plug-in instead of popular and/or free technologies?”
January 13th, 2009
Can Google save Soapblox?
If you’re not a political junkie you didn’t know this, but last week an important part of the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy went dark.
Soapblox, a proprietary CMS which hosts about 100 left-wing blogs (mainly state operations running on a shoestring) fell to a hack attack on January 7 and went down.
On the left panic ensued. As Chris Bowers of OpenLeft explained, in a note asking for contributions:
Soapblox has offered most of the features available on sites like Daily Kos and MyDD: user diaries, recommended diaries, promoted diaries, interactive comments, comment ratings, tip jars, and even things like quick hits. It is a lot of functionality for not much price.
In 2008, Bowers wrote, some 50 million Soapblox pages were served, with site managers paying just $15/month.
One of the first suggestions made after Soapblox went down was to switch to Drupal. Drupal is stable, it’s open source, and if something goes wrong there’s a community to help get you back running, a technical rather than a political one.
Making all this newsworthy here is word that Google has now released the first version of Blog Converter, a Python program that can be run via command line, a Windows batch script, or the Google App Engine.
Google’s J.J. Lueck writes on the readme file he’s part of Google’s data liberation front, but the joke is on many long-time bloggers such as me.
I have a personal blog. I have written there for four years. What if my host went down or I wanted to find a better deal? What if I wanted new features my host didn’t have?
Despite the fact my host software is open source, I’m as stuck as any Oracle scaled enterprise. All of which leads me to propose one of my favorite things, a business model.
The BlogConverter is perfect for a SaaS model. If WordPress wants me, they can hand the job to Google, which has the technical chops needed for the job. I’d be thrilled to write a check for such a service.
Meanwhile, what of Soapblox? President Paul Preston, wrote writes under the nom de blog Pacified, says everything is now OK. New features are coming, along with a more businesslike structure.
But as keen as Preston may be, his bloggers are still his customers, and as customers they must ask the hard question. What happens next time? What if it’s not a script kiddie, but a dedicated operation that doesn’t like my politics?
Help me, Google wan kenobi, you’re my only hope.
UPDATE: The move to create a Soapblox alternative based on Drupal is officially underway.
January 12th, 2009
What Meeks means by OpenOffice being sick
Michael Meeks (right), a Novell employee tasked to Open Office development, caused a firestorm this weekend with a blog post calling the office suite “profoundly sick.”
Meeks was explicit in his meaning at the blog, saying Sun is disengaging from the project, that its participation is not being replaced, and that improvements are grinding toward a halt.
Is he right? Eileen Yu at ZDNet’s Singapore office put out an all-hands alert today, coming up with lots of quotes on its governance issues and legal troubles, but no consensus on what needs to happen.
I think Meeks’ whine could snap OpenOffice out of its funk, which is linked directly to Sun’s fading business prospects and has no direct impact on the consumer market, where it is strong and getting stronger.
Sun cannot, and should not be expected to, bear the continuing costs of OpenOffice’s maintenance and governance. A solution starts with the company admitting that.
Second, those companies with a stake in its success, which include Sun but also Novell, IBM and others, need to get a handle on its licensing and governance issues, and reach a negotiated settlement.
Third, OpenOffice needs a clear chain of command. Who is in charge of the project — not a company but a person. Who is its project manager? Who will take responsibility for driving its success?
That success includes development of a working business model, whether based on SaaS or something else, that will make OpenOffice self-sustaining and independent.
My guess is that Meeks is correct in seeing a future where OpenOffice.org is governed through a structure similar to Eclipse and other multi-company projects.
Those who are predicting the imminent demise of the software are way off base. The stuff works, millions of users depend upon it, and that would remain true even if the organization supporting it disappeared tomorrow.
I relied on a 1997 copy of Microsoft Office for nearly a decade before Open Office came along. Office suites are mature software. I got along. I will again. So will others.
But it would be nice if the stuff were better, if add-ins came more readily, and if I could be as confident in the governance of OpenOffice as I am of Mozilla and Eclipse.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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