ZDNet Must Read:
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: Red Hat
October 23rd, 2009
Give Jim Whitehurst his due and proper
One of the hardest, and underestimated, jobs in business is to take over a going concern and keep it growing.
Examples are few. Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers comes to mind. It’s not broke, don’t fix it, just find a few ways to make it a little bit better and you can win a Super Bowl.
In football building on success gives a coach his “props,” or proper respect. In Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer it’s referred to as one’s “due and proper.”
In the world of open source Jim Whitehurst is a like Tomlin. Critics called Tomlin too young. They called Whitehurst “the airline guy” when he joined Red Hat from Delta Air Lines in 2008.
As with the Steelers Red Hat wasn’t broke when Whitehurst came in, and they’re just keeping on. The had another good quarter, the stock has more than doubled in value this year, and the market cap is now over $5 billion.
Whitehurst has done this with the business equivalent of blocking and tackling. Red Hat has no trick plays, no wildcat offense. For the fifth time (in six years) it topped all software vendors in CIO’s annual survey. That’s a bit like winning the Super Bowl, isn’t it?
I’m sure Whitehurst was asked, at his recent keynote to a business leadership conference named in part for Duke basketball Coach Mike Krzyzewski, “how do you do it? How do you get people to pay you for something they can get for free?”
The answer was probably the same as it is for every other successful open source vendor. You help people make the code work and get value from it. Free code is just code. Supported code is a business result. Red Hat is results oriented.
The bottom line doesn’t lie folks. Use this thread to give the man his due and proper.
October 6th, 2009
Red Hat offers Supremes an audacious brief
Red Hat has filed a “friend of the court” brief to the Supreme Court in hopes of having software patents invalidated once and for all.
The brief follows the logic of the U.S. Court of Appeals in re: Bilski but asks the Supremes to go further in deciding the case, now called Bilski vs. Kappos. David Kappos is the new Undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual property and director of the patent and trademark office.
The brief argues that lower courts erred in the 1990s, disregarding guideposts previously set by the Supreme Court and opening the floodgates for patents based merely on abstract ideas.
This is the heart of the argument:
Because the boundaries of software patents are exceedingly vague and the numbers of issued software patents is now enormous, it is virtually impossible to rule out the possibility that a new software product may arguably infringe some patent.
The brief goes on to argue that given such legal risks only the largest companies can afford to do any kind of software development, especially if it might involve real innovation.
Much of the argument is based on the 1972 case of Gottschalk vs. Benson, a decision written by the legendary William O. Douglas that invalidated a patent for turning binary-coded decimal numbers into pure binary numbers for use in a computer program.
The Benson ruling was that software was “merely a series of mathematical calculations” and thus did not constitute a “process” within the meaning of the Patent Act.
The brief even quotes Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, speaking in 1991 against the idea of software patents, arguing that if people understood how courts were moving when software was first being developed “the industry would be at a standstill today.”
It is, in sum, an audacious brief, as audacious in its way as new Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s recent argument that courts erred when they first called corporations persons in the 19th century.
Given history both arguments make sense. Given politics neither is likely to be accepted any time soon.
September 9th, 2009
OIN outmanuevers Microsoft, buys Linux patents
The Open Invention Network seems to have one upped Microsoft. Or has Microsoft one upped OIN?
Either way, it’s win-win for Linux.
Yesterday, OIN, whose mission is to defend Linux and open source from patent trolls, purchased 22 Linux related patents Microsoft recently sold to Allied Security Trust.
OIN chief executive Keith Bergelt would not say how much OIN spent on the patents but said it was a “meaningful amount.”
He said the open source community lucked out because the seller, AST, is not a patent troll. AST, not an investment vehicle, recently purchased the patents from Microsoft to “ensure that they did not fall into the hands of non-practicing entities that could seek to assert the patents against Linux products,” the press release stated.
Bergelt does not take issue with Microsoft’s rights to assert and sell its intellectual property but he did question why the software giant blocked OIN from the bidding.
Was it an overight? Or an attempt by Microsoft to circulate potentially dangerous IP bombs into the patent troll community?
The patents covered open source software related to operating systems and desktop and broader applications, Bergelt said. Some of them were purchased from former Unix vendor SGI.
“I don’t begrudge Microsoft’s opportunity to generate a fair return on their IP but I’m concerned about a strategy of selling Linux related and open source software patents to trolls,” Bergelt said to this blogger. No, they have not done this before and I’d hope it doesn’t happen again.”
He said it’s possible that leaving OIN out of the bidding was an oversight on Microsoft’s part — but not probable.
“I can’t imagine how they could justify it,” Bergelt said about Microsoft’s IP execs not being informed about OIN. “It [appears to be] an elegant way of insulating [the company] from criticism by [trying to]sell it to a troll.”
Again, AST is not a troll, Bergelt emphasized. But did Microsoft know that?
Sure, Microsoft made some money on the Linux related patents. That has to be annoying to OIN members who paid for them.
But this is a win-win for Linux. It demonstrates that Microsoft has not been able to cook up an uber mega legal case against Linux (maybe?) if it is selling Linux related patents to smaller entities.
And the more Linux related patents Microsoft sells, the fewer it owns.
It also demonstrates that OIN is functioning very well in the marketplace. For the money it paid, the Linux defense organization — which is backed by IBM, Novell and Red Hat, among others — has gained more patents to its own growing portolio and prevented the trolls from gaining control of 22 linux related ones. The OIN protfolio is now just south of 300 patents and more are coming.
OIN created 45 of its own and has another 45 patent applications in the works designed to protect the Linux roadmap over time.
September 2nd, 2009
Red Hat seeks respect for JBoss and ecosystem
Like the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield, Red Hat can’t seem to get any respect.
Reporters hang on every plot twist at Sun, at Firefox, and at Silicon Valley’s open source start-ups, while Raleigh-based Red Hat plugs away, dominating the enterprise Linux market, and the press just yawns.
Even Wall Street feels that way. Since its break-out performance of 2005 Red Hat has mainly traded sideways. Moving to the New York Stock Exchange has not changed the trend.
It might be because, except for its 2006 acquisition of JBoss, Red Hat has kept its head down and focused on business.
This week, with its Red Hat Summit and JBoss World show in Chicago, is no exception. While banging the drum for a webcasted press conference at noon today, Red Hat has announced the following items:
- A program to link its partner ecosystem.
- A Java Application Platform targeted at clouds.
- Version 2.3 of the JBoss Operations Network.
- A new certification for JBoss application administrators.
- An open source lab with 60 workstations donated to Carnegie-Mellon.
The only factoid that might wake up sleeping journos here is that the new Carnegie-Mellon lab will be housed in the Gates Center, made possible by a big donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Having covered technology for nearly three decades I can state as a fact that there is a big difference between West Coast and East Coast tech companies. East coast outfits tend to be staid and stable, and are often linked in some way to IBM, which epitomizes that style.
But here’s something you probably did not know. Over the last year Red Hat stock, now traded under the symbol RHT, has outperformed the S&P 500, outperformed the Dow Jones average, and even outperformed Microsoft. Its gain in that time is only about 7.5%, but it has gained while others have suffered.
Respect that.
August 12th, 2009
Will all the good open source companies be acquired?
Another one bites the dust.
Add SpringSource to the expanding list of independent open source companies that have been gobbled up by proprietary software giants.
Let’s consider the growing list: IBM’s purchase of Gluecode, Novell’s purchase of SUSE, Citrix’s XenSource deal, Nokia’s Trolltech buy, Sun’s purchase of MySQL, Oracle’s purchase of Sun (and hence MySQL and OpenOffice) and now VMware’s planned $420 million acquisition of SpringSource.
Is this what the founding open source developers envisioned?
Doubt it, but fewer open source backers are opposed to such mergers as the use of open source software expands in the corporate sector and mixed hybrid software stacks are growing up in the data center.
Open source is not toppling the ranks of proprietary software giants (yet) but the quiet revolution is taking place: the model of free and open software development has reduced vendor lock-in and is delivering enormous benefits to developers and customers, observers maintain. The acquisiton trend simply reflects this notion: industry titans can’t beat it so they’re joining open source, observers also maintain.
“I expect VMware will continue to invest and grow the platform and that bodes well for open source. I hope they realize that part of the value is the large number of people building on the platform for free,” said Larry Augustin, president and CEO of SugarCRM, a large open source CRM vendor. “VMware doesn’t have a long history in open source but this is a big bold step for them and I’m keeping my fingers crossed.”
“They did some contributions to the kernel and and made a free version of the hypervisor available but not in open source. This is their first big open source step and shows the value of these open source companies and platforms. ”
Some open source players question Oracle’s acquisiton of Sun but think the VMware-SpringSource marriage is a healthy one.
Open source is “a great production and distribution model, the latter being more important, that creates some truly enterprise-class products that customers need. For software developers this is especially true, since they want unfettered access to products to try them and understand how they work without needing to engage in a lot of commercial activity, which they find to be a distasteful time sink,” said Jeff Hartley, VP of Products and Marketing (correction) of Terracotta, which develops open source clustering software for Java and partners with both VMware and SpringSource.
“With our software, you can look at the code if you really want to know how it works, and you can suggest improvements or become a committer and help make future products. This point about distribution is perhaps just one reason why VMware and SpringSource make sense together, with Spring as an open source provider,” Hartley said. “As VMware builds its portfolio of products to make enterprise software easier to build and manage, it needs to connect up the stack with developers. SpringSource has certainly done a good job of that and is a big help in high regard in the developer community and have fantastic adoption.”
Once upon a time, corporate behemoths like Microsoft, Sun and VMware were considered the greedy proprietary vendors that open source startups would one day replace. Yes?
But that’s not panning out. Open source has gained credibility but the industry has yet to spawn another billion-dollar baby. So what shifted?
A realization that the open source business model may not be working as well as the open source development model? Or another aspect of open source’s bottom up success?
OpenBravo’s CTO recently said such deals are inevitable as proprietary giants infuse needed revenue into aspiring open source companies whose download count vastly exceeds their revenue.
Some think such marriages are ideal because they generate vendors with a healthy mix of proprietary and open source software. This prevents lockin while ensuring commercial provders enjoy a profit.
But will all successful open source companies end up in the clutches of proprietary software titans?
Have IBM, Novell, Sun, Citrix, Oracle and VMware thrown in the towel and see open source as the inevitable future? Or are they simply gobbling up the competition to protect their revenue streams for as long as possible, or making strategic buys to counter their rivals’ open source acquisitions?
I question this each time one of these deals are announced. Call me a cynic. But one has to wonder about the viability of the open source business model if all of the top open source dogs are acquired by traditional software vendors.
It’s understandable that venture capitalists who seed open source companies want to cash out but it would be nice to see another open source business succeed besides Red Hat.
I wonder how long it will take for Microsoft to make its first open source acquisition. Care to weigh in on the likely targets?
June 29th, 2009
Red Hat rumors sign of business as usual
The recent rumors of Oracle buying Red Hat are false, but are a good indication that business conditions are becoming normal again. (Picture from League City, Texas.)
The source of the rumor, according to our own Matt Asay, is Katherine Egbert, an analyst at Jefferies & Co. She’s trying to scare up some merger work, create some action in a slow market.
Both are healthy signs.
If brokers are fishing for merger work, it means there is capacity to do such work, and bankers have come in off the ledges they were on last fall. If action is seen as slow, that’s also good, because banking should be boring.
The substance of this particular rumor is stupid. Oracle has no need for Red Hat, since it has its own Linux business, and as Matt notes the open source buzz is in applications, not the operating system.
What we are seeing, generally, is an attempt to bring back the status quo, with highly-paid bankers and brokers controlling the economy and creating money out of paper.
That’s not happening, not because of regulation but because every recovery is different.
The next recovery will come from the work of companies like Red Hat or, more likely, from Red Hat’s customers, than from the financial services industry.
June 25th, 2009
At what stage of life is the open source industry?
Every industry goes through life stages, just like people.
At what stage is open source at, now, in the middle of 2009?
Matt Asay says we’re at the growth stage. He is cheered by Red Hat’s latest earnings. So am I.
But there is another way to look at this news. Is it possible we have already reached the consolidation phase?
Industry life stages are a little like the old joke about fame. Applied to me, they would be who is Dana, get me Dana, get me someone like Dana, get me a young Dana, and who is Dana? At age 54, I admit some may be looking for a young Dana. As to Matt, I think we want more people just like him.
Applied to industries, these stages would be the industry’s birth, its entrepreneurial period, its growth, consolidation, and the maturation of the market in the few strong hands left.
Or to put it more bluntly, what’s open source, get me open source, get me anything that sounds like open source, get me the big gun in open source, and who cares about open source.
Matt says we’re at the third stage. I fear we’re at the fourth.
In a market’s growth stage there are new jobs, new start-ups, new niches, and lots of business. The industry moves through the mass market like a whirlwind and people make money, In a market’s consolidation phase, the leaders are identified and the rest of the herd is culled.
It is possible I am confusing a general recession with a market consolidation.
Open source is now a feature throughout the software industry, and it is continuing to take share away from proprietary software in niches — like enterprise applications — where it is strong.
But will open source achieve a breakthrough in the desktop and mobile markets that will lead technology out of its present recession, or will it remain tied to servers, the area where Red Hat is strongest?
That’s the question I am asking myself today, and my fear is that we are indeed consolidating. But I am often wrong and would love to hear what the market is telling you.
Is there youth in that Red Hat, as it would be if Matt were wearing it? Or is it just hiding a giant graying bald spot, as it would be if I put it on?
Loading ...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 2nd, 2009
Red Hat's Fedora 11 to offer interop with Microsoft Exchange
Red Hat is not going to let the Microsoft-Novell partnership dim its own prospects for interoperability.
That seems to be the case with the Red Hat-sponsored open source Fedora project, which plans to release on June 9 a major upgrade of its free Linux that offers robust integration with Microsoft Exchange via a new feature called OpenChange.
According to a blog posted about the upcoming Fedora 11 release, code named “Leonidas,” OpenChange is the first open source implementation of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI). The interoperability with Exchange is also enbaled by incorporation of some portions of the next generation Samba 4 platform.
It’s a pretty big deal, and here’s why:
“The OpenChange implementation provides a client-side library which can be used in existing messaging clients to offer native compatibility with Exchange,” according to a Red Hat blog recently posted on the company web site. “Using the “libmapi” library, OpenChange allows clients such as Thunderbird, Evolution, KMail, and other open source applications to utilize the full range of MAPI functionality including messaging, shared calendars, contact databases, public folders, notes and tasks.”
Fedora 11 offers a host of other new significant features including support for the Ext4 file system by default. To see complete list, go to fedoraproject.org.
May 14th, 2009
Can the enterprise strategy work?
Right now a lot of the pain being felt by open source is on the enterprise side.
The recession has been painful for a lot of people. Budgets have been cut to the bone. The great thing about an open source subscription is you can kill it without a lot of guilt. Beats firing people.
Enterprise open source advocates note that it is, indeed, firing people. Without corporate support to run forges and organize direction, they say, the underlying projects will fail to provide what they promised, and the corporate datacenters they’re serving risk withering away.
When times are really toughed this can sound nuanced, no matter how basic it is.
The big test case is Red Hat,. which today announced a partnership with Ingres, and some new customers.
Ingres is more like a canary in this coal mine. Its fate during the downturn is less certain.
In associating with Red Hat, Ingres grabs a lifeline into the larger enterprise customer space. The release makes this explicit in the headline, noting that the enterprise customers “bet their business on open source.”
Personally I do believe there is a shakeout underway and I do believe Red Hat will survive it. But it’s important to Red Hat’s credibility that as many of those firms who have associated with it also survive.
So this deal is a big win for Ingres, even if it appears as agate in tomorrow’s news.
April 22nd, 2009
Red Hat maps dispel some open source myths
Open source is mainly a product of the English-speaking world. (Image from Red Hat.)
That’s one of the more surprising, and inescapable conclusions, I drew from checking out the Red Hat “open source maps” created by Georgia Tech. (Go Jackets.)
The maps are the outgrowth of a joint project called the Open Source Potential Index Project, headed by Tech professor Douglas Noonan. (Paul M.A. Baker Ph.D writes to say he did the heavy lifting.)
The maps were created by ranking the open source activity and environment in each of 75 countries. Here are some other conclusions:
- Brazil’s activity level is higher than its actual support for the software.
- Russia’s is just the opposite.
- Canada’s environment for open source isn’t great, but it is extremely active.
- China and India are not nearly as dominant as you think. Neither government has yet matched deeds to words.
If government rhetoric and claims of support can boost a national open source community then change is coming. A great experiment has begun and I hope the map is redone in a few years so we can visualize the results.
Check them out yourself. They’re fun.
April 15th, 2009
Why open source needs the SYNNEX channel
The most important point I tried to make in yesterday’s controversial post was that, for retailers, there is something beyond free, a price lower than zero.
That price is sales support. It comes in many forms. Collateral materials, promotions, co-op ad dollars, customer support.
Since they have no guaranteed money coming in, even after the product is moved, open source vendors can’t make big promises along these lines, and thus sell direct, not through channels.
All of which makes Red Hat’s Open Source Channel Alliance a much bigger story than you imagine.
This is not aimed at retail, in the sense of a Fry’s or a Best Buy. It’s aimed at what used to be called the VAR market, the Value Added Reseller, being a joint-venture between Red Hat and SYNNEX, a business distributor which calls itself a “business process services” company.
The best news may be that this deal is as important for SYNNEX as for Red Hat, given that the former was dropped by IBM last year, for reasons that make SYNNEX sound like a pretty good outfit.
Unlike earlier efforts, which aimed to organize small VARs and encourage them toward open source, this new group is top-down. It’s SYNNEX putting together an ecosystem of tool vendors that can replace IBM in its line-up.
This makes the deal important for Red Hat, too. It expands its footprint among the mid-market enterprises it has long targeted. But there are risks. The non-performance of OSCA members will rub off on Red Hat just as their positive performances will.
This means bigger deals are the target, and SYNNEX will have a heart-attack serious emphasis on vendor performance, not just in vague “support” efforts but in getting customers’ kit working and paying for itself.
This will, in turn, cause all the members of the alliance, like Jaspersoft, Zenoss and Alfresco, to raise their games. If SYNNEX is going to bring you in on engagements where the other choice was IBM, your efforts will be compared directly to theirs and you had better measure up.
So in some ways this is like getting a call-up to “the show,” and those who don’t perform go down to the minors. Perhaps to stay. The manager as well as the players.
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 22nd, 2009
Red Hat learns the white paper game
One of the most time-honored traditions of technology marketing is the white paper. It appears as an unbiased, scientific study of an important problem, but there is usually a vendor behind it.
Red Hat is learning how to play this game, but at a cost and in a manner open source can live with.
Thus we have this PDF, under the byline of Caroline Boyd, which states your government would save about $24 billion over three years by switching to open soruce, virtualization and cloud computing.
The paper, from the MeriTalk community, is mostly charts and assertions. Microsoft was quick to discredit it, saying it tries to simplify a complex problem, and that while clouds and virtualization are cool open source is “just a business model.”
The merits are less important to me here than the method and the engagement.
Microsoft loves white papers done by others, making claims which benefit it. It’s a key marketing strategy. The fact that Red Hat is engaging here is a positive sign. The fact that Red Hat is competing actively for government business is another positive sign.
By doing this through MeriTalk, which is filled with techie bling like podcasts and video, and which aims to bring actual federal employees to the party, Red Hat appears to be bleeding edge when it’s really doing something out of the 1950s. A nice touch.
All this is, of course, part of a larger game. With a new Administration comes the hope for new approaches in contracting, and new favorites among contractors. Now is a good time for open source to pounce on this opportunity.
It’s also more fun to make proprietary interests respond to open source rather than have it be the other way around.
February 11th, 2009
Happy days for Black Duck
With people losing their livelihoods left and right, it’s gratifying to find someone with unalloyed good news to report, especially if they come out of the open source movement.
So let’s hear it for the little black duck. No, not that one. Black Duck Software.
- Bookings were up 42% year over year, and service revenues were up 65%.
- Black Duck has secured $9.5 million in new financing, including $4.5 million in loans.
- Black Duck recruited Tim Yeaton, once vice president for worldwide marketing at Red Hat, as its new CEO. He was given credit there for driving the acquisition of JBOSS, still one of the biggest open source merger deals ever.
Black Duck’s business is tracking the use of open source, and complying with all licenses, in the enterprise. This helps break down one of the key objections to open source, by automating what would be a substantial legal hassle.
Black Duck also owns Koders, a database of open source code used by many companies around the world. This makes open source code highly attractive by making it highly available.
All of which, apparently, means money, profits, and jobs. Happy days. I know it’s still mid-February, but I needed a little Christmas.
October 23rd, 2008
Is Linux really worth $10.8 billion?
How did the Linux Foundation come up with a value of $10.8 billion for the code in Linux?
Amanda McPherson (right), the group’s vice president-marketing and developer programs, said they used the Cocomo Model to estimate how much it would cost in labor to replicate the code base.
“We took a community distribution as released, downloaded the source, and ran it through a tool to count it, then put it into the Cocomo model that Wikipedia has.
“Open source is about the code, it’s not about putting people to work. There are so many people, it’s so complicated, but the one thing that’s real is the code. We looked at it and analyzed the code and used a well-regarded tool.
“I was surprised it was that big a number.”
That figure is for the full Fedora 9 distribution, sponsored by Red Hat. For the kernel alone, the figure is $1.4 billion.
This is the same methodology David Wheeler used in 2002 to come up with a value of $1.2 billion for the entire code base, giving you some idea how much it has grown since.
Makes you wonder what Windows is worth, but McPherson can’t find out.
“I haven’t seen this done with proprietary software because you can’t download the code.” Another advantage of code visibility is value visibility.
August 18th, 2008
Carnegie-Mellon freshman gets first Fedora scholarship
Incoming freshman Ricky Zhou of Carnegie-Mellon University (go Tartans) is the first winner of a Fedora Scholarship, funded by Red Hat.
Zhou is an active member of the Red Hat Fedora community, working on the group’s web site and infrastructure. He has also worked on localizing the project Web site.
In addition to getting money for college Zhou wins a trip to the project’s annual development conference, FUDcon.
There is a FUDcon scheduled for the Czech Republic next month. I suspect RedHat is actually sending him to the December conference in Boston.
The scholarship project is a win-win-win. You raise the profile of major open source projects, you honor contributors when they’re approaching career decisions, and you win scads of free publicity.
Like this.
June 30th, 2008
Open-Xchange releases preview of next groupware server for Web 2.0 era
Open-Xchange has released a preview version of its next generation open source collaboration server designed for the Web 2.0 era.
Open-Xchange Server Edition, which will succeed Open-Xchange 6 and Open-Xchange Express Edition, features an Ajax-based, customizable user interface for managing emails, contacts, task and document sharing, new mashup capabilites provided by Netvibes Universal Widget API and
support for OSGi, which will ease the addition and removal of third party applications, the Tarrytown, NY company plans to announce July 1.
Aside from the Ajax support, the new UI also offers a plug-in architecture to ease integration of instant messaging tools, as well as support for text messages and faxes.
The architecture is modular and allows for Open-Xchange to snap into existing mail servers without migrating all the e-mail data.
The mashup feature enables easy integration of web applications such as RSS feeds, podcasts, video channels, Salesforce.com and SAP Business One, thus allowing users to have one central information center.
The OSGi framework allows for snap in of third party applications such as virus and spam protectio with zero downtime, the company also said.
The new server edition also offer support for the latest enterprise Linux distributions: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Linux 10.
The software is expected to ship in the third quarter of 2008. According to the company, Open-Xchange is installed at more then 3500 companies and sites worldwide and is hosted by many service providers including Network Solutions in the U.S.
June 26th, 2008
Time for open source to build a Code Recycling Center
Corporations hold a ton of open source code behind their firewalls, and Jim Whitehurst wants to extract it.
The Red Hat CEO knows whereof he speaks. Before joining the company he was at Delta Air Lines.
In introducing the subject Matt Asay called this code waste. Which gave me a clever idea.
Don’t think of these as corporate code contributions. Think of it as code recycling.
For the open source movement, seeking recycling instead of contributions may require some changes.
Right now we expect contributions to be coherent. We expect documentation, and verification, and maybe a signature proving that this code came from Corporation X and it’s being contributed without blah-de-blah-blah.
But when you think recycling, there’s less for the contributor to do. Maybe you separate your glass, keep the aluminum cans from the steel, magazines separate from newspapers.
Then consider what happens when you drop stuff off at the Goodwill or Salvation Army. They’re lucky if it comes in boxes. It’s expected that they will do a lot of work to make contributions ready for market.
That’s the kind of model I’m looking for.
So rather than just having Red Hat support this effort, maybe we need something larger, with more projects paying for it. We don’t know what’s coming in, after all. It’s not going to be sorted.
The open source industry has finally become large enough to support this kind of effort, if we all work together.
What I’d like to see is a Code Recycling Center. Corporate development staffs could unload their open source code, in whatever condition it may be in, secure in the knowledge the right home will be found for it.
The Code Recycling Center would acknowledge the contribution and then go through the code, passing along what’s relevant to member projects, dumping the junk.
The corporation will have done its duty, the community will have the contributions, the code will be recycled, and it’s a win-win for everyone.
What do you say?
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.
Subscribe to Linux and Open Source via Email alerts or RSS.
SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads
- VMware Infrastructure: A Guide to Bottom-Line Benefits VMware Frustrated by the costs of maintain ever larger data centers?or building ... Download Now
- The True Costs of Virtual Server Solutions VMware In an economic environment that is repeatedly heralding the message "do ... Download Now
- Three Steps You Need to Know to Stop Data Loss Varonis Sensitive data exposed to misuse or loss... it is the stuff of nightmares ... Download Now
Essential Topics 
- Top-ranked Novell support for Red Hat at 50% less
- Get top-ranked Novell support for Red Hat when you switch
- Move to SUSE Linux Enterprise. Get 3 years of Red Hat support
- More interoperability, plus 3 years. Red Hat support, only from Novell
- Red Hat support, patches, updates with the interoperability of Novell
- Unrivaled Red Hat support now available from Novell
Recent Entries
- Death of the black box EULA
- Chrome OS will rise or fall on the safety dance
- Larry Augustin’s practical revolution at SugarCRM
- Google goes all-in with an open source cloud
- Tim O’Reilly and the Cassandra act
Blogs From Our Sponsors
Most Popular Posts
- Google makes Chrome OS open source today
- Google-Microsoft rivalry on with ChromeOS launch
- The importance of Sixth Sense going open source
- ChromeOS says tear down this network regulation wall
- Linux to your grandma this Christmas
- Five ways Android could get into trouble
Top Rated
- Google makes Chrome OS open source today+16 votes
- Should search engines pay tribute to content?+6 votes
- Broadcom goes open source and hell freezes over+6 votes
- Chrome OS will rise or fall on the safety dance+6 votes
- Enterprises saving $26 million per project with open source+6 votes
- Microsoft partners to allow Eclipse interop on Win7, WinServer 2008 R2, Azure+5 votes
- The stupid network will get a hearing+5 votes
- Linux to your grandma this Christmas+5 votes
Premier Vendor Content Whitepapers, webcasts & resources from our Power Center Sponsors
- Keep Up With The Latest In Document Management with The DocuMentor.
-
Doc delivers the scoop on today's enterprise content management, printer maintenance, and all other issues related to document management. It's the DocuMentor Blog.
- Learn more >>
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online - Free Six-Month Trial for Eligible Organizations
-
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online provides fast online access, simple contact management and better sales performance for a low monthly cost - the best value on the market today.
- Learn more about the free, six-month trial offer>>
- Learn more about tools to grow your business
-
The Business Essentials Guide provides you useful tools and templates to help grow your business and save you time with automated shipping solutions.
- Save time with the UPS Business Essentials Guide
Archives
Favorite Links
Blogroll
- Andy Updegrove Standards Blog
- Bob Sutor’s IBM Open Blog
- Doug Levin, former CEO, BlackDuck
- Dries Buytaert
- Fabrizio Capobianco - Funambol
- Jeff Haynie
- Law and Life in Silicon Valley
- Marc Fleury
- Mark Shuttleworth
- Matt Asay
- Michael Tiemann OSI
- Mitchell Baker, Mozilla founder
- Open Source Assistive Technology Center
- Red Hat blog
- Russell Ossendryver
- Sam Ramji
- Savio Rodrigues
- Stormy Peters
- WorldLabel Blog
Favorite Links
ZDNet Blogs
- All About Microsoft
- The Apple Core
- Between the Lines
- BriefingsDirect
- Collaboration 2.0
- Dev Connection
- Digital Cameras & Camcorders
- Ed Bott's Microsoft Report
- Emerging Tech
- Enterprise Web 2.0
- Forrester Research
- Googling Google
- GreenTech Pastures
- Hardware 2.0
- Home Theater
- iGeneration
- Irregular Enterprise
- IT Project Failures
- Laptops & Desktops
- Lawgarithms
- Linux and Open Source
- Managing L'unix
- The Mobile Gadgeteer
- On Sustainability
- Rational Rants
- The Semantic Web
- Service Oriented
- Smartphones and Cell Phones
- Social Business
- Social CRM: The Conversation
- Software & Services Safari
- Software as Services
- Storage Bits
- Team Think
- Tech Broiler
- Technology and the Global Supply Chain
- Tom Foremski: IMHO
- The ToyBox
- Virtually Speaking
- The Web Life
- ZDNet Education
- ZDNet Government
- ZDNet Healthcare
- Zero Day
White Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads
- The True Costs of Virtual Server Solutions VMware In an economic environment that is repeatedly heralding the message "do ... Download Now
- Five Steps to Determine When to Virtualize YourServers VMware Server virtualization isn't just for big companies. Entry-level ... Download Now
- The Impact of Virtualization Software on Operating Environments VMware Today's use of virtualization technology allows IT professionals to ... Download Now
Enterprise Applications
- Check out some of the easiest and most powerful ways to boost productivity while saving money on your application infrastructure. See ZDNet's comprehensive Enterprise Application resource center, now!
- New Online Dashboard
-
- Read about top issues IT decision-makers face every day, plus get cost effective solutions to real life IT problems. Oracle Topline
-
