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Google makes Chrome OS open source
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Category: virtualization
November 19th, 2009
Terracotta buys Quartz
Open source Java clustering software developer Terracotta announced its intent to buy an open source job scheduler known as Quartz.
The integration of Quartz into Terracotta’s platform will ease high availability job scheduling and scaling applications to multiple nodes, the company said. Quartz is currently integrated into SpringSource and Red Hat products and counts Adobe, Cisco, Level 3 and Vodaphone as big customers. It eliminates the need for a central database to handle coordination, Terracotta reports.
Terracotta, of San Francisco, intends to support the Quartz open source project and will maintain the code under the Apache 2.0 license.
The job scheduling software will enhance Terracotta’s use in virtualized and cloud infrastructures, the company says.
“Quartz is ideal for creating simple or complex schedules for triggering application tasks such as driving process workflow and generating application data reports and recurring system maintenance checkups,” according to a release issued by Terracotta on Thursday.
“Now, with the acquisition, Terracotta will quickly integrate Quartz within the Terracotta platform to enable users to easily scale applications in large virtualized environments and private clouds and to distribute the massive workloads characteristic of these environments,” Terracotta announced.
October 26th, 2009
Ubuntu celebrates Thursday drop of koala desktop and server
Ubuntu held a teleconference this afternoon to celebrate the Thursday launch of its new desktop and server edition, karmic koala.
The new desktop is built around “Ubuntu One,”a collection of backup, note and contact synchronization and file-sharing services integrated into the operating system, offering 2 Gigabytes of free storage and more by subscription.
The Firefox 3.5 browser and improved audio support are also part of the offering. GNOME 2.28 is the shipping desktop interface.
On the server side the situation is more cloudy, but in a good way with the addition of full support for Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, from Eucalyptus Systems, that lets you create your own mini-cloud based on open source. The clouds feature host and guest virtualization under KVM and guest virtualization under Xen.
Most new features were previewed in April.
A complete online tour of the new desktop is already online. A list of supported netbooks is available, but the company is suggesting you pack a thumb drive with its Ubuntu Netbook Remix when you go to the store, just to make sure. Should make Friday at Fry’s fun.
October 1st, 2009
GroundWork Monitor 6.0 offers new view into virtual data center
GroundWork is a leading open source systems and network provider and recently enhanced its platform with JBoss and Microsoft System Center support.
That’s not all. GroundWork Monitor 6.0, which shipped on September 2, offers a new “Seurat” view designed to allow administrators to access the status and performance of hundreds of hosts and services. Version 6.0 also offers a redesigned status view that provides performance data in a single view.
The company quotes Cameron Haight, a Gartner Vice President, who comments that the Seurat View is a break from traditional topology and tree-style views, which may not be sufficient for dynamic, virtual data centers and cloud computing infrastructures.
Monitor 6.0 also features a revamped user interface based on the JBoss Portal and a new dashboard builder for both the community edition and enterprise editions.
The new user interface purports to offer finer grained, roles based access controls and a higher level of customization. The software’s new tailor made monitoring allows admins to to create and customize personal and roles based dashboards for any purpose.
Earlier this month, GroundWork announced the availability of a connector to integrate its software with Microsoft System Center. The GroundWork Connector, which is available standalone and separate from GW Monitor 6.0, pulls data from Microsoft System Center and displays it within GroundWork Enterprise Edition.
September 16th, 2009
If you liked Microsoft CodePlex you will love MySpace FoxForge
OK, the new MySpace open source project is not called FoxForge.
Just because News Corp. owns something does not mean everything on it gets the Fox logo or the Fox attitude.
(After writing this I decided to check out the Web address FoxForge.com and found this cute little guy next to an “under construction” sign and an address at Lycanthrope.net. At last check Foxforge.org was still available.))
In fact the MySpace open source offering is called Qizmt. It’s a GPLv3 MapReduce project aimed at building distributed applications for large clusters of Windows servers.
The software is already being used in a MySpace feature called “People You Know,” writes our own Dave Rosenberg, and MySpace has plans to expand its use.
While this story started with snark, however, I do have a serious question to ask, which relates to both MySpace and Microsoft’s CodePlex. That is, does the ownership of a project color your view of it?
Would Facebook have overtaken MySpace had Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. not bought its parent company, Intermix, in 2005, with a prediction that MySpace would drive traffic to other Fox sites.
I believe the answer to that is no.
The reason is the nature of this medium. You may not care whether a movie comes from 20th Century Fox, or whether the Fox TV network is broadcasting your favorite NFL team this week. But on the Internet it’s easy to walk out. The exit sign is just a mouse click away.
Thus reputation is a crucial asset online, far more important than in the offline world. If you like someone you are inclined to stay with them despite their faults. If you don’t like them you are inclined to not give them a chance.
This colors attitudes toward all Microsoft projects, including CodePlex and its Bing search engine. I take that for granted on this beat. You’re either pro-Microsoft or anti-Microsoft. Middle ground is scarce.
The same is true for Murdoch. People either like his products or hate them. They rush toward them or avoid them. There is little middle ground. This defines a strong niche market, but also makes other parts of the market off-limits.
I believe this colored attitudes towards the music-oriented social network and, unfortunately, most of the target for that product lived in an “anti-Murdoch” world. The question is how that might color reactions toward Qizmt (which I assume is pronounced Kismet, like the Rogers & Hammerstein musical).
Will you think of this as a FoxForge? Or not?
September 1st, 2009
Microsoft lover Citrix as heroine of the open source cloud
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?
June 24th, 2009
Reductive to service Puppet open source configman tools
Key founders of Puppet have incorporated and received $2 million in venture capital funding to advance the open source configuration management software project.
Reductive Labs, which has evolved from the same named consulting firm founded in 2003, will provide training, service and support for Puppet, the next generation open source infrastructure automation framework which is reportedly gaining strength and numbers of users.
Reductive has formed partnerships with Red Hat, Fedora and Canonical and has about 20 paying customers. Puppet currently supports Linux, Unix and Macintosh environments.
Puppet, which was first made available under the GPL in 2005, is a configuration management framework that enables customers to write policies about how web servers should be configured, how database servers should be configured and how mail servers should be configured,” said Andrew Shafer, chief strategy officer for Reductive Labs, which will be headquartered in Portland, Oregon. “Puppet lets you write policies, enforce them and automate them on an ongoing basis and operating system installation through patches and upgrades.”
Shafer said it’s important to have a robust policy-based configuration framework that can significantly speed up deployment of corporate servers. He noted that policy-based tools are valuable because few servers are configured in the exact same way in any corporation.
He pointed out that configuration management becomes even more critical as virtualization and cloud computing take off.
“With virtualization, your hardware headache eases but with thousands of virtual machines you’ve multiplied your configuration management complexities,” said Shafer. “People are bringing up thousands of [virtual] machines with EC2 [cloud] and configuration management complexity is further magnified. Bringing up a test infrastructure or a deployment infrastructure becomes a much easier proposition than trying to manage it in other ways.”
One senior systems engineer at Digg.com was able to rebuild 60 [virtual] machines from scratch in two hours [using Puppet] that would have taken two full days of work if done manually. “And I was largely a spectator,” said that engineer, Paul Lathrop, of Digg. “Now that’s automation.”
“And if he needed to build 600 machines, it wouldn’t have taken much longer,” because of the policy-based configuration management approach, Shafer said.
Its biggest competitor is amorphous: thousands of unique scripts system administrators write for their own environments, Shafer said. There are some model-based configuration management frameworks developed by BMC’s BladeLogic and HP’s Opsware but nothing in the open source space that compares to Puppet, Shafer said.
Reductive has no plans to commercialize the framework into a product per se and will focus exclusively on the services side of the business. Puppet 0.25 is currently in beta testing and represents a huge step forward: three times the speed in one third of the memory footprint of the current 0.24 series.
June 16th, 2009
Is Vyatta now part of Microsoft keiretsu?
Maybe my recent trip to Japan is still in my brain, but reading about Citrix leading a new Vyatta funding round provokes the headline question.
A keiretsu, for those scoring at home, originally meant a conglomerate consisting of interlocking companies under central control.
But as I warned my Japanese friends during the recent trip, if we Americans like a word we’ll steal it. Then change it.
In America a keiretsu is more a cross between the Kevin Bacon game and Kremlinology. Market players infer relationships based on who has what link to whom and how close the link is to a dominant company.
Citrix, which also owns Xen, the virtualization company, has long-standing links with Microsoft such that open source advocates routinely think of it as being in Microsoft’s orbit. (The illustration above, from Bob Warfield’s Smoothspan blog, illustrates this keiretsu concept in terms of cloud computing.)
The Citrix-Vyatta link, discussed here by Dan Kusnetsky (who also has the good sense to partner with our own Paula Rooney) is a second-order link. That is, Microsoft links to Citrix links to Vyatta. (A litle like Bacon’s own relation to Hitler, as seen on The Daily Show.)
It’s a delicate dance, especially at times like this when growth capital is so scarce. Time will tell whether Vyatta tilts toward, say, Xen in helping craft customer solutions. Or whether it starts pushing Novell’s Suse Linux over, say, Red Hat. ‘
But people will be watching.
June 1st, 2009
Sun shoots its final Open Solaris arrows
This may be the last CommunityOne event for Sun as an independent company, and if it is the company is going out with an open source bang.
Sun is putting everything it has into the new version of Open Solaris, dubbed 2009.06, and promising once again to unify the open source and paid versions of the operating system.
Director of product management Dan Roberts gave ZDNet a preview. The highlights are:
- Project Crossbow, which puts networking into the operating system stack and reduces the need for networking hardware.
- Project COMSTAR, allowing centralized management of storage, turning commodity servers into storage servers and moving the data used most often onto flash drives.
- Virtualization built into the operating system, so that hypervisors like Xen can be run as containers.
Roberts said Sun is also reducing the cost of its Open Solaris support contracts, and unifying those prices with those of Solaris. There will now be three tiers of support — $324 for basic, $720 for standard and $1,080 for premium.
“That gives existing Solaris customers the option of running a collection of Solaris and Open Solaris under the same contract because there’s no price difference,” Roberts said.
Putting networking, storage management and virtualization inside the operating system kernel of a scaled, enterprise-class operating system is going to be a very big deal, Roberts added.
The moves seem aimed squarely at Sun’s newest rival in the hardware space, Cisco Systems. By putting controls normally associated with Cisco networking inside the Open Solaris kernel Sun hits Cisco where it lives. Or Oracle does.
Where Sun will be living in a few months is another story.
March 30th, 2009
Citrix ships free XenServer to fend off Vmware, Hyper-V and KVM
In a move designed to accelerate uptake of its open source virtualization platform, Citrix announced today worldwide availability of its free enterprise ready open source XenServer.
The Ft Lauderdale company announced it February it would make XenServer software with hypervisor as well as features and functionality and unlimited deployment capabilities included at no cost to customers.
Citrix is fighting off industry giants VMware and Microsoft on the proprietary side as well as Red Hat, which is backing a rival open source hypervisor called KVM. Although Xen is the more established of the two open source hypervisors, KVM’s incorporation into the Linux kernel makes it a serious threat to Xen’s long term viability, some observers maintain.
The free version of XenServer is available for download in 50 countries. Citrix had a preview available for download after the announcement hit the wires last month.
The XenServer has many significant features including full live motion and multi-node management but Citrix isn’t giving away the whole farm for free.
A forthcoming product dubbed Citrix Essentials for XenServer offers at cost a range of other desirable features such as lab automation, dynamic provisioning, workflow orchestration, high availability and integration with leading storage systems, Citrix said.
Red Hat said it will continue to support the Xen hypervisor in its enterprise 5 Linux release for several years but has embraced KVM for the long term. Last year Red Hat purchased KVM pioneer Qumranet to lead the way.
In my book, there’s room for two open source hypervisors. Xen continues to have significant support from open source backers and will continue to have support as long as Citrix behaves like an open source vendor.
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 3rd, 2009
VMWare delivers open source client
VMWare has delivered a virtual client system under the Lesser GPL, VMWare View Open Client.
Both the code and support are already available on GoogleCode.
The idea behind VMWare View is that personalized desktops are actually hosted in corporate data centers, enabling close control while maintaining individuality.
In its release about the code VMWare talks about releasing it to partners, but quotes the head of its Desktop Business Unit saying that vendors can easily optimize devices to create the best virtual desktop solutions.”
The pitch behind the code is Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for desktop clients, allowing high-priced capabilities to reside on low-end hardware. The release quotes Gartner research claiming thin clients will be 40% of all desktop terminals by 2013, with 50 million licenses purchased.
If this succeeds it could really be a game-changer. Imagine what the PC world would be like if enterprises are able to slow purchases regardless of head count. Imagine what Microsoft revenues might look like in that world.
January 26th, 2009
IBM seeds clouds on global profit drought
IBM’s strategy for both growing and squaring the circle of open source profit comes down to a single word.
Clouds.
Dennis Quan, whose title is director of autonomic computing, made this clear in a ZDNet interview as IBM announced the completion of IBM Blue Clouds in Qatar, Japan and South Africa, which will be used by six universities.
Taken together the clouds demonstrate that IBM has multiple business models for cloud formation.
- The Qatar cloud is build-to-suit, for three area universities who will do data mining, environmental work and business analysis.
- The South African cloud will be managed by IBM, again on behalf of university clients.
- The Japan cloud will be aimed at cloud education, building high-level cloud expertise for use in building the market.
Quan called clouds an “ongoing evolution” of trends in Web hosting, grid computing, virtualization and distributed computing over 20 years, but the result poses some very complex system management and scalability challenges.
IBM likes complex things. In complexity there is profit.
Clouds are about offering massively scalable facilities over the network. All the aspects of the cloud service lifecycle – sign-up, SLAs, utilization, metering and billing, termination and rescheduling – all those are part of the service management story we have at IBM about managing clouds and the services they get from clouds.
What’s important is that there isn’t just one cloud. There will be many clouds built under many arrangements, public and private, some of them heavy on back-end processing, others heavy in user-facing applications.
Once you get into the complexity of a cloud, questions like whether you’re running Linux or Windows, open or closed source go away. You’re buying cloud services and for IBM the money just pours down.
January 23rd, 2009
Citrix, Intel developing open source Xen desktop hypervisor
Citrix’s promised Xen-based desktop virtualization solution will be delivered in the second half of 2009.
Earlier this week, the Ft Lauderdale virtualization company announced that it is co-developing the solution, known as “Project Independence,” in collaboration with Intel, one of the original investors in the Xen open source project.
The planned desktop solution, which will be optimized for Intel’s Core 2 desktops and Centrino 2 laptops with vPro, features a local hypervisor that will better support mobile and offline use. Current server-based VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) solutions stream desktop content to thin clients that must always be connected to the network.
With a full desktop virtualization, business consumers can carve up their PC to support different environments, such as corporate and home personalities.
It also delivers support for offline mobility, which is greatly demanded by enterprise customers but cannot be fulfilled by server-based solutions. “You can disconnect from the network and still access that corporate desktop and make sure that all of the hardware features including high definition audio is possible. Doing that in VDI is much harder,” one Citrix exec said, noting that end users don’t have as much bandwidth from network solutions as they do from inside the CPU in their PC.”A solution like this hasn’t existed to this point. ”
The desktop virtualization solution, for example, will offers the same benefit of centralized desktop management and fast application deployment as server-based solutions while extending to end users a rich PC client experience.
Ian Pratt, the founder of the Xen project, said the solution combined with Intel technology will give end users the same bare metal performance on their PC as they currently enjoy.
The dynamic desktop assembly platform allows enterprise customers to package up applications securely, deploy the appliances quickly and manage them as well as desktops are managed using VDI, they say.
The solution is based on technology Citrix acquired when it bought XenSource and Ardence, a streaming solutions company in Waltham, Mass.
December 9th, 2008
Springsource, VMware partner to create enterprise Java VMs, appliances
Springsource and VMware have partnered to ease the process of creating and deploying open source enterprise Java applications in virtualized environments.
The partnership calls for cooperation on multiple levels. First, it is designed to integrate the Eclipse-base SpringSource Tool Suite and VMware Workstation. This will result in a new set of virtual machines for developer desktops, thus allowing developers to ”quickly and easily specify virtual server configurations for different development and test scenarios,” the two companies said in a joint statement.
“These virtual appliances will allow developers to select a variety of build targets with different operating systems and application server configurations without needing additional physical hardware - dramatically accelerating software development times and reducing hardware costs,” the companies said.
Secondly, Springsource has pledged to develop two open source application-server virtual appliances – the SpringSource tc Server and dm Server virtual appliances. Springsource’s dm Server is a modular, OSGi-based Java server designed to run enterprise Java applications and Spring-powered applications with improve flexibility and reliability, the company claims. SpringSource tc Server, the other server, is an enterprise version of Apache Tomcat.
“When run on VMware Infrastructure, these appliances will enable the portability of enterprise Java applications across desktop and data center environments,” according to a releae issue by both companies this week. ”Virtual appliance configuration, deployment and debugging will be integrated with the SpringSource Tool Suite, and ready-to-use virtual images will be provided for dm Server, tc Server and Apache Tomcat.
The first commercial offerings are due in January of 2009, the companies said.
December 4th, 2008
IBM launches first Linux-OpenOffice desktop with virtualization features
IBM has added a Linux desktop with new virtualization capabilities to its portfolio.
The Virtual Desktop, which bundles Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux, Virtual Bridges’ KVM-based desktop virtualization software and IBM’s Open Collaboration Client Solution, is available now, Big Blue announced on Thursday.
None of the pieces are new. But the bundled solution makes it easier and cheaper for companies to deploy a complete VDI solution on Linux, IBM maintains. IBM’s OCCS includes Lotus Symphony, its implementation of the ODF-based OpenOffice, as well as Lotus Notes and other applications.
“People are finally getting comfortable with what virtualization can do for them on the desktop. It’s been on the server but now people want to know why they can’t virtualize client workloads,” said Austin, Texas-based Jeff Smith, vice president of Linux and open source for the IBM Software Group, in an interview this week.
IBM will serve on the front line of support but the solution is a go-to-market with all three parties and problems will be farmed out to each company. Virtual Bridges’ Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment runs about $49 per seat, while Canonical is about $50 per seat. IBM Lotus Symphony is free but the Notes and other applications are priced separately.
Smith maintains the solution is less expensive – about half the cost of — the incumbent Windows/Office/Exchange desktop offering, regardless of Microsoft’s Enterprise Agreement discounts, designed to keep its longtime desktop customers from moving to open source.
“It’s not a secret business strategy for Microsoft. They will be very aggressive on pricing but at the end of the day it’s tough to start cutting prices on things that represent the vast majority of its profit.”
The biggest problem is inertia, particularly in a time of such economic unrest. Still, Vista’s unpopularity and IT funding issues will make the sell easier, Smith said. “A lot of people are reticent to take the forced march to the next Windows and as a result of the pressure in the financial system, they’re opening up their view on what the possibilities are and looking at other choices,” he said.
That’s been said for many years with little real market success for the open source desktop. But Smith claimed the deep economic crisis is causing disruption in this and in many other industries, leading to new opportunities for startups and alternatives.
“The Ford 150 used to be the best selling car in Texas but in two months sales went through the floor and it’s no longer the best selling vehicle in Texas,” he noted. “An event [gas price hike this summer] caused them to question their assumptions and they looked at their choices. It’s starting to happen [in IT] and gives new opportunities for Linux and the Mac.”
October 1st, 2008
HP puts $360 million on LeftHand to say OS is no matter
The key point in HP’s purchase of LeftHand for $360 million isn’t the target market, but what it says about HP’s attitude toward operating systems and source code, even for smaller customers.
It doesn’t matter.
HP was already one of LeftHand’s technology partners. Alongside IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Sun, and Oracle. All offering open source operating system contracts to customers.
LeftHand’s attitude toward technology is, in a word, yes. VMWare? Yes. Embedded Linux? Yes Indeed. Entry-level environment? Sure. Solaris? Practically a specialty.
The deal is good for LeftHand because many of its current needs have been for sales management positions. HP closes that gap. And with money tight its customers need not fear that their storage vendor will get hit by a bank note call.
This might be because, as vice president-business development Karl Chen (a former HP executive) said in a 2006 interview, LeftHand began as an Internet storage network outfit. The magic acronym in this case being iSCSI SAN.
HP doesn’t need to care about what you got. This attitude is being driven down to smaller-and-smaller enterprises. LeftHand is a strategic acquisition in that drive.
But in a virtualized world no one outside the legal department has to know whether your source is closed or open, whether you’re based on Linux or Windows. Does it transport over IP? No problem, then.
September 19th, 2008
Will VMWare go open source without legal pressure?
VMWare basically admits in its latest SEC report that it’s violating the GPL, and says it is thinking about open sourcing its ESX hypervisor. (Picture from the Grameen Foundation.)
But as we noted last week, the Linux folks are not rushing to their lawyers demanding legal retribution. Just the opposite.
Which brings us to the question, will VMWare do the right thing (open source what the GPL has already touched) without legal pressure being brought to bear on it?
It would be ironic if events went that way, given that the company is now run by a former Microsoft executive and its chief competitive threat now comes from a free Microsoft hypervisor.
The ex-Microsoftie, Paul Maritz (above), told ZDNet Australia this at his company’s annual conference in Las Vegas:
“One of the fabulous things about the open source movement is that they are the ultimate enforcer of fair pricing. If you don’t evolve, they will clone your software, and take away your value.”
Notice he didn’t say if you steal their stuff they will sue your behind and make certain you release it.
The bottom line is that the choice in this matter seems to lie with VMWare. The question is whether it should.
September 12th, 2008
Does interoperability violate the GPL?
I got an e-mail this morning, tickling me to look into the idea that VMWare is violating the GPL.
This idea has been around for some time and Big Money Matt has covered it beautifully.
(Matt Asay’s writing is first-rate and his sources top-notch. If he ever decided to become a full-time reporter I’d hire him in a New York minute.)
Apparently VMWare loads a module of Linux in order to provide its function, which is virtualization.
In a response to one of Matt’s pieces Bruce Perens of the Software Freedom Law Center wrote in to say that nVidia does the same thing, but that the Linux Foundation has done nothing to pursue the matter in court.
“This legal theory will have to be decided with another GPL kernel, not Linux,” he concluded.
The reasonable follow-on question becomes, why? And the answer I return with is interoperability.
One of the key Internet values is that things should work together. By following the Internet Protocol while online Linux and Windows machines do just that.
But the concept of interoperability goes beyond this, and it can run into a brick wall with absolutists on both sides. If you can’t touch the code you can’t interoperate. You can’t virtualize.
Long ago, Linus Torvalds took a practical approach to this problem. The Linux kernel has never been subject to FOSS absolutism, the requirement that in order to use it you have to give everything you do back to the community.
As to the questions raised by VMWare, it would seem, Torvalds brings up the loadable module exception. It’s a gray area, he writes. He doesn’t want to get into it. Better to write code.
This is part of what I call the Fourth Freedom, the freedom to get back what’s added to the code, the tip of the spear separating FOSS from open source.
FOSS considers this to be bedrock, open source clay. Open source, as a business model, is not rigid on this point. FOSS, especially through the GPL V. 3, attempts to be rigid on this point. Linux is still under the GPL V. 2.
VMWare has been, since August, a member in good standing of the Linux Foundation. The question my PR friend was asking, in other words, has been asked and answered.
If you want to bring suit based on an interpretation of the GPL at odds with the understanding of the Linux Foundation go ahead. But so far no one has taken them up on the offer.
Should they?
September 2nd, 2008
Could Google's Chrome be death blow to Firefox?
No doubt, Google’s forthcoming open source browser — known as Chrome — is going to challenge other open source browsers, most notably Firefox. It could be a devastating blow to Firefox, which has amassed and taken roughly 18 percent of browser market share away from Internet Explorer in a short time.
Although Google has been an ardent supporter of the Mozilla team, it appears that the online giant has decided to take on Microsoft with a full portfolio of web applications, rather than relying on other open source projects to fill in the gaps. Might this explain the recent departure of Mozilla’s VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer to Facebook?
Or is this a prelude to Google acquiring Mozilla? Google, after all, recently extended funding to Mozilla and someone must have been notified that Chrome was imminent. In a recent blog reflecting on Mozilla’s 10 year anniversary, Mitchell Baker pointed to Google’s support as a key indicator of its success: “Another important element is the financial resources Mozilla enjoys. We’ve just renewed our agreement with Google for an additional three years. This agreement now ends in November of 2011 rather than November of 2008, so we have stability in income,” Baker wrote.”
Chrome, which is launching into beta testing today, is a very full featured open source browser and is unique from Firefox in several respects.
First, it will have a private browsing feature known as Incognito, which allows users to browse in total privacy. It does not record sites visited or any aspect of the web session. (Firefox is working to include this feature in FF 3.1 but it’s not there yet).
Google has taken the tab-style browsing metaphor used by Mozilla and Microsoft to a new level. Chrome’s user interface features tabs on top, rather than windows containing tabs. The search panel — dubbed an omnibox — is the URL box at the top of each tab. Popups can be assigned to each tab to protect the integrity of each process. Like Mozilla Prism and Adobe AIR, Chome allows web applications to be launched in their own window without the URL search bar to allow web applications to run next to local software simultaneously.
Chrome also features multi-process support and contains a Javascript Virtual machine.
Multi-process support is said to significantly improve the stability of browsers because it can support multiple web applications simultaneously and isolate each process in its own tab. If one web app crashes, for example, it won’t take down the whole browser — just the corrupted tab. Surfers can launch a process in one tab and go to work in another. The V8 Javascript Virtual Machine is designed for speed and supports the more substantial web applications of today.
Google’s Chrome also features an open source rendering engine known as Webkit, the same engine used in Google’s Android. This will no doubt make it easier to integrate Google’s forthcoming mobile platform — Android — with the Google Desktop, now equipped with its own browser. This can’t be good news for Firefox’s “Fennec” team.
Larry Dignan of ZDnet suggests that perhaps Google and Mozilla are working together as a tag team to defeat Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and that Google may perhaps purchase the Mozilla Firefox crew and integrate the two code bases to deliver a kock out punch to Microsoft’s IE. Will Mozilla become Google browser labs? Given the close cooperation of the two projects, it’s more than possible.
If not, though, the debut of Chrome can’t be good news for Firefox. Google has so much market momentum that it doesn’t necessarily have to have the best open source browser to displace Firefox. And on the face of it, Chrome looks pretty good.
August 8th, 2008
Open Gear and cloud infrastructure
We talk a lot about cloud computing, but not much about the enabling technologies.
Virtualization is a key, often done through an open source Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). Then you need switching to move these machines about, turning mere hosting into a cloud that can serve any size business, with the hardware abstracted from the software.
Finally you need to manage that infrastructure, which is where Open Gear comes in. They were at LinuxWorld this week, introducing a gateway console that lets you bring legacy IBM gear to the party.
Between customers CEO Bob Waldie gave me a few minutes of his time.
“There is an awfully large investment in legacy IBM management infrastructure. It would be imprudent for a lot of companies to replace it, when they can use it to meet their needs,” he said.
While a lot of KVM technologies are now built into processor platforms, Waldie said, there is still a lot of old kit which must be retrofitted. That’s his sweet spot.
“The marketplace we’re serving, the management of infrastructure and power, that market segment is growing. Particularly in tough economic times you have to lift your quality of service in a far more cost effective way.
“Our pitch is we offer value, integrated solutions, one box that lets you manage everything.”
The efficiency of Linux in using system resources makes it a great choice for controlling the cloud, but beneath that management layer you can run anything — any application stack and any operating system. It’s all good.
This is where the market is growing, Waldie said. Clouds under Linux.
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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