Linux and Open Source

November 25th, 2009

Death of the black box EULA

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:03 am

Categories: FOSS, General, Internet, Legal, Satire, business models, mass market, values

Tags: Software, Box, EULA, End User License Agreement, Tools & Techniques, Management, Dana Blankenhorn

Computing’s greatest accomplishment of this decade will likely go unremarked in the popular press.

I call it the “death of the black box EULA.” (Picture from the blog Fortunes Pawn Luncheonette, December 2007.)

Free software wounded it in the early 1990s. The Internet stabbed it again. But it was open source, in this decade, that struck the fatal blow.

Users under 25 may be unaware of what I am talking about. Let me explain how the scam worked.

1. I have this black box. It does tricks. I sell you the tricks it does with fancy TV ads or in glossy magazine spreads. You want my black box. You want it bad.
2. I will let you use a copy of the black box, but I will not sell it to you. I will take your money but you are not buying anything.
3. All this is covered by an End User License Agreement (EULA), written in a form of elvish. You signed it when you ripped open the black box.
4. The EULA states that the box may not work. The EULA states the box may do nothing. Regardless, I keep your money.
5. The EULA says you can’t look in the black box and try to fix it. You can’t even see what’s inside. You might steal it. Maybe I will talk to you on the phone about it from India.
6. Here is another black box. It fixes the first one, makes it better. It’s more stable. You need an upgrade, maybe a new computer, but you really, really want this black box. Seen the ad?
7. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The black box EULA is descended from licenses IBM wrote in the 1950s, when computers filled great rooms and the value of calculating, say, the pay-outs for a horse race were worth a fortune.

Software was unstable then, even more so than now, and without the EULA companies like IBM might have been sued out of business by angry customers. The computer revolution may never have happened without the black box EULA.

Companies like Microsoft brought the black box EULA into the 1990s intact. Even though PCs were very reliable, even though software storage had become stable, and even though the creation of software was no longer a black art, the black box EULA remained.

The black box EULA made Bill Gates a billionaire 50 times over. It made many other people wealthy too, rich beyond their wildest schemes.

But the black box EULA was always hopelessly one-sided. It was unfair to customers. And lawyers could provide no help — they had written the black box EULA and were sworn to uphold it.

So folks like Richard Stallman struck a blow against wealth and said software should be free. Not only free but visible so you could see it, smell it, kiss it, touch it. Fix it, improve it. And they wrote their own license, which they dubbed copyleft.

The war against the black box EULA was on.

The free software folks won applause, but the people who needed complex black boxes were skeptical. They knew you couldn’t just give stuff away, that software writers need to eat, too. Even if Linus Torvalds was happy with hamburger while the customers ate steak, a way was needed to get him a hamburger. And a beer.

This is what I have now spent a half-decade covering. Open source is a transformation enabled by the Internet, born of righteous indignation, and driven home by hard-headed businessmen and women on both sides of major transactions.

So now you have an alternative to the black box. The makers of black boxes know they can’t hold customers to their EULAs forever. They have to compete with free. The eye of Gates has fallen. The age of men has begun.

The black box is now encased in plastic and steel. You can return an iPhone to the store. The EULAs are still there, and they retain their legal weight, but they no longer control the market.

It’s a good time, at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, to look back from these heights and see what has been accomplished.

The black box EULA no longer has the power to cloud mens’ minds. It is dead as a controlling force in the software world. You can open the box, see what’s inside. You are free to tinker with it, to freely connect with it, and you no longer think of it as a black box that holds all light, but as a physical product, with a warranty.

There are obligations on both sides. It’s a fairer and more just software world. It’s worth celebrating this Thanksgiving.

Happy Turkey Day.

November 24th, 2009

Chrome OS will rise or fall on the safety dance

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:37 am

Categories: Development, General, Google, Security

Tags: Developer, Google Inc., Web Browser, Linux, Web Browsers, Security, Operating Systems, Software, Internet, Dana Blankenhorn

Google has the chance to make desktop Linux secure.

By starting with a blank sheet of paper, and lessons learned while developing its browser, Google wants to build a lightweight OS for netbooks that avoids the weekly “security update” hassles of its big-time rival.

This means the processes Google is addressing with Chrome — system hardening, process isolation, secure auto-update, verified boot, intuitive account management, defenses in depth, and devices secure by default — have to be more than buzzwords.

But there is something even more important Chrome OS has to do in terms of security. That is it has to develop  an ecosystem of applications around itself that are themselves secure.

This is something it has yet to do with the underlying browser (and Google is clear that the browser is the technology under its operating system). Most Chrome add-ons are Google-written. Compare it to what Firefox offers — there is no comparison.

Google has to find a way to reach out to the creators of add-ons and plug-ins, as well as applications, and not only get them supporting the OS but supporting it in the same secure way Google supports it.

This will not be easy.

An alternative is to focus on the Linux application space rather than the browser space, even though, as Google says, all Chrome OS applications will run from the browser.

In this case Google must convince Linux application developers to emulate its secure process, promising massive distribution for apps that may not now be ready for prime time.

So it’s not just about what Google’s programmers do in terms of security that will drive Chrome OS. Google needs application developers to accept its security development framework as well. That means doing the kind of marketing to developers (developers, developers, developers, developers) Microsoft has been doing for decades.

And it’s not just about doing the Ballmer dance. It’s about getting those developers to do the safety dance.

November 24th, 2009

Larry Augustin's practical revolution at SugarCRM

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:58 am

Categories: General

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Microsoft Corp., SugarCRM, Larry Augustin, Sugar, Augustin, Tata, Sales Force Management, Open Source, Sales

Because of his experiences at the dawn of open source, Larry Augustin has always viewed himself as a practical, hard-headed businessman.

The failure of VA Linux to launch obscured our view of that image but at SugarCRM he is making certain we know it’s front and center.

Sugar’s sniping at Salesforce.com is basic target marketing. Aim at what you want to be, make yourself David to their Goliath, but let that be the start of your strategy, not an end in itself. It’s like George Carlin’s 7 dirty words — it gets you attention but you need an act to back it up.

Augustin’s act is to emulate Salesforce’s delivery, only with powerful allies. Like Microsoft. A founder of open source committing resources to a Microsoft release, the Azure cloud? As Sarah Palin would say, you betcha.

Playing with Microsoft makes SugarCRM a player head-to-head with Salesforce. It substantiates the marketing. It puts some there, there. It scales SugarCRM up, makes it a player. The fact that it helps Microsoft is incidental. If an ally helps you, you help an ally.

Then there’s a third leg to the triad, his deal with Tata to bring CRM as SaaS to India. India is a big market. Tata has major resources. India is a competitive market. You get better by playing in such markets. Your software gets better by having allies like Tata helping it move forward.

There is what Will Ferrell’s George W. Bush would call “strategery” in all this. The alliances help him match deeds to words. The SugarCRM slogan on its home page, “the cloud is open,” describes this pretty well.

Pretty soon we’ll forget all about SugarCRM’s badgeware past and start rooting for it, as the scrappy underdog next to Salesforce, never mind its alliances with Microsoft and Tata. This is smart, basic, strategic thinking. It’s how real executives earn the big money.

Of course, having just a vision’s no solution, everything depends on execution. Larry Augustin is less interested in being part of open source’s past than its future.

November 23rd, 2009

Google goes all-in with an open source cloud

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:13 am

Categories: Cloud Computing, General, Google, Internet, telecom, values

Tags: Google Inc., Open Standard, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

Google quietly announced last week that its cloud will run nothing but open source software.

This is a big deal, but let’s first admit why Google did it.

As I have written many times, Google has a big cost advantage when it comes to delivering Internet resources.

It’s like America’s nuclear advantage during the Cold War. Anyone who sought to compete with America in terms like throw-weight would bankrupt themselves. President Reagan encouraged this competition and the Soviet Union bankrupted itself.

So as Google enters the cloud computing wars with outfits like Amazon and Salesforce.com, it is to its advantage that there be no proprietary software advantage. On a level playing field it dominates. They’re the New York Yankees without a salary cap.

Openness, represented by open source and Internet standards, are all to Google’s advantage. This is why opponents of open standards, like Scott Cleland, go to such rhetorical lengths to claim that open standards are, in fact, proprietary. If open standards are proprietary you can set closed standards without harm to the market.

But open standards set terms of competition that advantage the low-cost producer of bits and processing. The question for policymakers, both public and private, is what the terms of competition will be, not who wins.

Cleland and other Bell apologists want their clients to win. Thus they support regulation based on scarcity, under which the winner is the outfit that can hire the most apologists. I own no Google stock, and I make no money from Google. Never have. Probably never will. (If I do I’ll let you know.)

We should set terms of competition that advantage consumers, not particular producers, and that reward plenty rather than scarcity. By that standard Google’s dominance is a fair one, fairly obtained, and so long as it’s not abused it’s a good thing.

In making its cloud open source, Google shows it understands this.

November 23rd, 2009

Tim O'Reilly and the Cassandra act

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:38 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim O’Reilly is not powerless.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, she replies. It’s horrible.

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

November 20th, 2009

Oracle opponent cheers delay in mySQL decision

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:41 am

Categories: Database Management, GPL, General, Government, Oracle, Strategy, Sun Microsystems, mergers & acquisitions

Tags: Oracle Corp., MySQL, Open Source, Databases, Enterprise Software, Software, Data Management, Dana Blankenhorn

Florian Mueller, coordinating opposition to Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems and mySQL, sent a note today cheering word that Oracle has asked for, and gotten, a six-day delay to answer European objections to the purchase. (Picture from Roberto Galoppini.)

Mueller, a former mySQL shareholder and strategic advisor, is working with mySQL co-founder Monty Widenius.

“Oracle is now apparently backtracking from previous claims that the European Commission has no credible theory of harm. If the EU’s objections were baseless, Oracle wouldn’t need more time now to develop its arguments. This is another sign of enormous weakness only three weeks after Oracle withdrew its antitrust application in Russia.

One more week won’t change the fact that MySQL competes fiercely with Oracle’s database products including its flagship ‘11g’ across all major market segments. One more week won’t transform a traditional company product like MySQL into a community project that could be developed by volunteers just because it’s open source. The best way Oracle can make use of this extra week is to think really hard about selling MySQL to a suitable third party.”

Mueller said the delay in Oracle’s response means a decision on the merger won’t come from the European Commission until January 27.

Widenius strongly disagrees with mySQL co-founder Marten Mickos on the Oracle-Sun deal. Mickos as written to EC Competition Commissioner Nellie Kroes asking that the deal go through.

My personal view is that Oracle could spin control of the code base into a foundation like Eclipse, with control based on investment, which would also enable money to flow in from mySQL stakeholders like Amazon.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison insists the delay in Europe’s approval is degrading the overall value of Sun, which also controls such important open source projects as Java and Open Office.

I do not disagree.

But due to its open source license Oracle is not gaining control of the mySQL code base, just becoming its commercial sponsor. So why not bring free money to support the code base and have something better to sell support on?

It’s reasonable that Ellison resents the interference of European bureaucrats in Oracle’s affairs. But personal feelings should not get in the way of business. This is business.

Business is just business.

November 19th, 2009

Google makes Chrome OS open source today

Posted by Paula Rooney @ 10:52 am

Categories: General

Tags: Google Inc., Web, Operating System, Netbook, Netbooks, Nettops & MIDs, Open Source, Channel Management, Hardware, Marketing, Paula Rooney

Contrary to rumors, Google did not release a beta version of its much anticipated Chrome operating system today. And nothing is coming anytime soon: the final version is at least a year away, the mega giant web company said.

But there was some significant news for the community today. 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.

All the code is open and sketches of the design documents are available now. The final version of the cloud-based operating system is expected to ship at the end of 2010, before the holiday season, executives said.

Google also provided an early demonstration of the web operating system, which sports a Chrome browser-like interface that features application tabs instead of web page tab and a seven second bootup time that is expected to be much faster on its release.

For example, users will see the same clean tabbed style interface but the tabs on the upper left hand of the screen are for gmail, Yahoo, Facebook and any other web service or application customers use on a day-to-day basis.  All of the data, of course, is stored in the cloud.

Executives who showed the demo Thursday said the Chrome OS functions more like a TV than a computer. It is entirely solid state and based on Flash memory storage so there’s no latency that comes with using a hard disk.

The OS uses web-based security model. The software offers a verified boot and cryptographic signature keys that check for and ensure there’s no malware impacted the applications.  Like the Chrome browser, it will also feature security sandboxing to isolate one web application from another.

The web operating system will offer auto-updating and synchronization capabilities.

Go To Market

Google is working with partners to specify hardware competence and reference implementations at the hardware level.  That is, Google Chrome OS will support only solid state drives and select wireless cards. This means that customers will have to buy a new next-generation netbook or device that is designed for the Chrome OS.

The initial form factor for 2010 is the netbook. Laptops and desktops may follow in the future.

Google expects hardware devices to fall in same price range as netbooks are today.  Chrome OS netbooks will be larger and feature a full sized keyboard.

“The code is open. We would not be here if it were not for several large open source projects such as Linux kernel, Ubuntu, Moblin and webskit,” said Caesar Sengupta, Group Product Manager. ”We’ll be a good open source citizen.”

The open source operating system won’t support other browsers natively but third parties including Mozilla and Microsoft can take the code and do Firefox-based and Windows-based versions of the OS.

More Google Chrome OS coverage:

• Microsoft finds security hole in Google Chrome Frame
• Google Chrome OS security overview
• Releasing the Chromium OS open source project
• The Chromium Project
• Google’s Chrome OS: Will you give up desktop apps?

November 19th, 2009

Terracotta buys Quartz

Posted by Paula Rooney @ 7:16 am

Categories: Cloud Computing, FOSS, GPL, mergers & acquisitions, middleware, virtualization

Tags: Job, Clustering, Terracotta, Quartz, Recruitment & Selection, Open Source, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Paula Rooney

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.

November 19th, 2009

ChromeOS says tear down this network regulation wall

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:05 am

Categories: Cloud Computing, General, Google, Government, Internet, LANs and WANs, Legal, business models, mass market, politics

Tags: Software, Network, Chip, Wall, ChromeOS, Unleash Moore, Network Technology, Semiconductors, Networking, Hardware

An Australian friend wrote yesterday with a question:

I really can’t see the point of a cloud-based OS for the general user. The added cost in using it doesn’t seem worthwhile.

It would take me over 6 months to upload my data at my connection speed not to mention that ISPs here in Australia have now included uploads as part of your total usage which for me would be exceeded for those 6 months.

So can I ask - why choose ChromeOS ?

These are good questions. They have been vexing me ever since IBM and Ubuntu launched their Africa-only Linux, based heavily on network use, a few months ago.

It got me to thinking about the 1980s, the dawn of the Windows era.

Each new release of software pushed hardware beyond its limits. To get the latest new features, to review new software, I had to buy a new top-of-the-line PC every few years. Software sold hardware.

This helped make more than Bill Gates rich. It delivered fortunes to the entire semiconductor ecosystem — from box makers like Michael Dell to chip makers like Andy Grove of Intel to chip equipment makers like Jim Morgan of Applied Materials — everyone sold everything they could make at a fat profit.

All of today’s current trends — you can add clouds and the iPhone to this — are pushing demand for networking much as chip demand was pushed then.

What will meet that demand is just what met it then — Moore’s Law. Not Moore’s Law as Moore wrote it, but as it has been applied in networking technologies like optical fiber and radios.

Thanks to Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing, a single optical fiber today can carry many times the data it carried a decade ago. Thanks to Digital Signal Processors we can do the same thing with wireless data.

What is holding back network capacity is politics. We still think of it in terms of telephony, a regulated industry managed for scarcity. It’s not that way, and hasn’t been that way for a long time.

Throw out the old rule book and write a new one, based not on scarcity but abundance. Let the competition to serve more-and-more bits drive entrepreneurs to new fortunes around the world. Open more spectrum to unlicensed use, like WiFi is regulated, demand wholesaling of the last mile, and the bits you unleash will make us all rich again.

That’s what today’s software is telling us. That’s the message of ChromeOS. Unleash Moore’s Law in networks, unshackle competition to provide faster-and-faster data services, and watch the economy of the world take off again.

With ChromeOS Google is making the same call on networks Microsoft made on chips two decades ago. It’s a call that demands a response, not just from the market but from governments.

Deregulate. Free the bits. Here and around the world.

Or, as Ronald Reagan might say, Mr. Genachowski, tear down this wall.

November 19th, 2009

MindTouch launches its open source cloud

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:29 am

Categories: Cloud Computing, General, Infrastructure, Software as a Service, business models

Tags: MindTouch, Open Source, Software As A Service (SaaS), Emerging Technologies, Dana Blankenhorn

You can argue that clouds are fast becoming synonymous with SaaS, but MindTouch has launched its own cloud to serve up its open source collaboration solution.

MindTouch bills itself as the open source alternative to Sharepoint and recently named our own Matt Asay as the second most-influential executive in open source. (You’re number one in my book, Matt.)

Pricing starts at $7/month, but you can try it free. It allows non-programmers to overlay data from a variety of internal and external resources in a single collaborative environment.

You might consider it an enterprise mashup service akin to Salesforce.com’s Chatter. But while Chatter is focused on social media MindTouch is focused on enterprise data — Chatter is about social and MindTouch about media.

Of course that last may be a comparison of sales pitches, not feature sets. MindTouch is launching its cloud just a week after announcing its Enterprise Dashboard, so these features may just be at the top of its mind right now.

Clouds will bear careful watching in 2010. They not only abstract complexity and virtualize everything, but they also blur the lines of open source and proprietary with a unitary business model based on SaaS. Which means everyone in software competes with everyone, and on the same playing field.

Which would leave me with nothing to write about. Maybe I can finally start that novel.

November 18th, 2009

Where Microsoft is gaining in open source

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:52 am

Categories: GPL, General, Microsoft, Software Licensing

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

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

Microsoft is gaining.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So there is room for growth there.

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

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

November 18th, 2009

Google-Microsoft rivalry on with ChromeOS launch

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:04 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, Mr. Bill, is resistance futile?

November 18th, 2009

Competition made Microsoft open source embedded .NET

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:34 am

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

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

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

Competition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 17th, 2009

Five ways Android could get into trouble

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:43 am

Categories: General, Google, Hardware, Linux, Linux Handheld, telecom, wireless

Tags: Apple iPhone, Google Inc., Android, Smart Phones, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Dana Blankenhorn

On the surface these are happy days in Android-land.

Going into the key Christmas selling season, Android is eating Windows for lunch. New (non-Google) development centers are continuing to open, new manufacturers are coming on stream.

What could possibly go wrong?

Knowing that rising markets need a wall of worry to keep going up, here are some possibilities:

1. Momentum must be maintained. Once you start gobbling market share you have to keep doing it. Even a slowing of momentum can be read as failure.
2. Developers must be kept happy. Some are complaining they’re working full-time getting apps written for the Android operating system running on multiple phones.
3. The Android app store has some catching-up to do, especially in the user experience area.
4. When will Android get a “killer app” that the iPhone can’t match, or one it hasn’t already matched?
5. Can Google ride herd on its complex ecosystem? Everyone knows who the boss is with the iPhone. Not so with Android. (UPDATE: Rich Sands writes to say this article from his site is more to the point.)

We shouldn’t get too excited about Android’s early success. A 3.5% market share is still a gnat on Apple’s elephant. Early buzz does not make for victory — as President Howard Dean will tell you. (Or President Huckabee, if you prefer.)

Google has set itself a more complex task than that which faced Apple when it introduced the iPhone a few years ago. Google is using an open source approach, which means there are more hands on the steering wheel. And Google is trying to overcome an established leader, leading to charges of me-tooism.

A good start is not the race.

November 17th, 2009

What a decade taught Larry Augustin

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:07 am

Categories: Cloud Computing, Database Management, General, Software as a Service, Strategy

Tags: SugarCRM, Larry Augustin, Augustin, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

At 46, Larry Augustin is much too young to be the grand old man of anything.

But he is one of the grand old figures of open source. He was in the group that coined the term back in the late 1990s.

Larry was Sourceforge, he was VA Linux, back during the dot-boom 10 years ago. He rode the stock to $240/share, then watched it plummet to nearly nothing in the dot-bomb.

Once had had a Web site, made it run. Made it race against time. Once he had a Web site, now it’s done, buddy can you spare a dime?

But Larry kept his hand in. He became an angel investor and adviser, a “go-to” guy for any open source start-up looking for some street cred. His current bio has him on 9 different corporate boards, topping the list of the most influential people in open source a few months ago. (Our own Matt Asay was number two.)

The news today is that Larry is the permanent CEO of SugarCRM. Appointed on an interim basis in May to replace co-founder John Roberts, he has pointed the software into the cloud, adding a business model to its large community.

What has he learned in that time?

• Influence is not a contest among bloggers. Augustin’s last blog post is dated July.
• Companies grow through teams. The next negative word about SugarCRM’s people I hear from Larry will be the first.
• The future of open source is in SaaS, in the cloud.

Larry Augustin’s story is proof that second acts in business are possible. Most of those who boomed during the dot-boom were never heard from after the dot-bomb. But not Larry.

His story reminds me of the man who was managing my Atlanta Braves when I first moved here in the early 1980s. He won a pennant, got fired, got kicked around. He got a few gigs, did some broadcasting, advised a few people here and there.

Then he got another shot, in New York, and he took it. His second chance made Joe Torre a sure Hall of Famer.

I can’t guarantee Larry Augustin the same success, but after a decade in the wilderness he has a team again. Hard for me not to root for the “old guy.”

November 16th, 2009

Should search engines pay tribute to content?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 2:43 pm

Categories: Google, Internet, business models, content, mass market

Tags: Google Inc., Search Engine, Rupert Murdoch, Journal, Internet, Search, Construction, Dana Blankenhorn

Tom Foremski, one of the good guys here at ZDNet, is out with a piece suggesting that Google fork over whatever Rupert Murdoch wants in order to keep indexing Fox News.

His argument is that losing access to regularly-updated content would be a big hole in Google’s business model, which is based on making everything out there available.

I have two problems with that:

1. If one publisher can force Google to pay for a link, so can every other publisher. Blackmail never ends.
2. Publishers have tried this before and failed. Including Murdoch.

I think the first point is more important. Foremski argues that newspapers get little traffic from Google. This is true, mainly because, as he notes, most still haven’t got a Clue when it comes to the Internet.

Google has already taken their wire service traffic away, signing side deals with major wire services like AP, posting those stories on Google pages, paying back the ad revenue. The only newspaper content left is local or beat-specific. Most traffic to those stories comes from the local area.

So if the traffic flow is modest, why should Google be paying? Just to protect its reputation?

There is no need to argue the point. We can run an experiment.

Let Bing or Yahoo pay Murdoch, and let Murdoch put robots.txt files on all his properties, keeping them away from Google’s crawlers. See what happens. If there’s real market share to be gained here, Google’s competitors will be happy to buy it.

On to the second point. Both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have tried the paid model. The Journal maintains it, but offers links to the full-text of its stories, through Google. The Times gave up its Times Select program as a money-loser.

Yes, The Journal began its program before Google bought it. But I also remember a time, about a decade ago, when Fox site managers were transferring every link deep into their site to the home page. It was maddening. They stopped.

There’s some basic math at work here. The smaller your circulation base, the more specialized it is, the better off you’ll do with either a paid model or a registration model.

Lots and lots of journals allow only access to abstracts if you’re not a registered user. The New England Journal of Medicine is an example. And there are many publications only available to paying customers, who are notified of updates via e-mail.

The problem is that if you want a mass audience on the Internet, you have to make yourself available to a mass audience. Newspapers are mass circulation publications. Throwing up registration windows or pay walls hasn’t worked for them.

But, again, Murdoch (and every other publisher) is perfectly free to try. Just write a simple robots.txt file forbidding indexing. Poof, you’re invisible to the search engines’ spiders.

There’s no real controversy here, IMHO. Publishers are free to conduct what experiments they want with Google, either seeking to tweak it to get more audience, or block it to access a smaller, elite audience.

History says Murdoch is barking at the Moon. But he likes to write his own history. Let him try.

November 16th, 2009

Montavista embedded Linux eaten by Cavium

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:33 am

Categories: Distributions, General, Hardware, Implementations, Linux, mergers & acquisitions

Tags: Chip, MontaVista, Cavium, LinuxPundit Bill Weinberg, Embedded Linux, Linux, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software, Dana Blankenhorn

Embedded Linux is proprietary by its nature.

Expressing software inside a chip, then selling the chip, gives embedded Linux a business model, but that business model is tied closely to the success of the chip being sold.

So as chip makers have turned to Linux to power their new designs they have bought the software houses that pushed embedded Linux. Intel bought Wind River and now Cavium has bought Montavista.

LinuxPundit Bill Weinberg is troubled by this, but not for the reason you think. Very few of these companies are left now, and those are very small. But Weinberg is concerned more that Montavista failed to bag the really big bucks it was seeking at its founding 10 years ago.

What embedded Linux means for users and software developers is that there are open source on-chip tools you can write to and use for building bigger applications. Who controls the embedded Linux company is less important than that it succeed.

Cavium is considered a “start-up” networking chip company, but it’s doing some cool and interesting stuff.

This month Cavium showed a networked high-definition WiFi design, dubbed netHD, that can move 1080 HD feeds around your home on an 802.11n set-up. It’s working with Hitachi on “security processors” and drives the latest Netgear firewall. Despite continuing losses stock buyers have bid the company up to $850 million.

One can argue that, while Montavista hoped to sell for more, its investors are now getting a taste of a fast-growing proposition. And their success, Cavium’s success, will be open source’s success as well.

NOTE: My apologies to those who like to engage in flame wars here, for delivering a story that contains nothing but good news. How about this….Microsoft! (Stallman?)

November 13th, 2009

The stupid network will get a hearing

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:07 am

Categories: Freedom2Connect, General, Government, Infrastructure, Internet, LANs and WANs, telecom

Tags: Network, Networking, Dana Blankenhorn

Advocates of transforming network regulation from Bell services to dumb bits will get a hearing from the FCC, as David Isenberg, author of the classic Rise of the Stupid Network, has joined the agency as an expert advisor.

(Picture taken in 2004 from Isenberg’s Isen.com Web site.)

Isenberg will be part of the team that will deliver the National Broadband Plan to Congress in February. He wrote on his blog that, as a result of his agency assignment his annual conference on broadband reform, Freedom2Connect, will be postponed.

A bit of disclosure. I covered the 2006 Freedom2Connect conference in Washington for ZDNet.

In the Stupid Network essay, which he wrote while at AT&T in 1997, Isenberg argued that the most efficient network is controlled at the edge, with a design based on the idea of plenty rather than scarcity, and transport based on the needs of the data.

The idea, he wrote, was that the network did not need intelligence at the center, that it should just “deliver the bits, stupid.” Hence the stupid network.

The problem is that while the stupid network is fine engineering, great for users and consumer equipment suppliers, it doesn’t leave much for the telephone company to do but move bits. And Isenberg wrote at a time when the bit-moving market was highly competitive, with prices falling every few months.

Thus the phone companies have argued against the stupid network. They have sought to install gear within the parts of the Internet they control to guarantee Quality of Service, to distinguish between bits based on protocol or what the customer is paying to move them, and to stop bad bits before they arrive at a user’s desk.

“Those are nice bits there, a shame if something happened to them.” And the phone company is Santa Claus, deciding which bits are naughty and which are nice.

The problem with this is it slows the network, and creates a barrier to entry for innovation, which must win permission from the network operator in order to reach the market. It is also redundant if customer equipment can handle tasks previously done by the intelligent network.

The Internet, as it exists today, is essentially a stupid network.

Cellular networks, you will note, are completely different from stupid networks. Such networks are all centrally controlled, with the carrier defining different bits as separate services, controlling who can sell what, and taking a cut on every transaction.

Isenberg left AT&T in 1998 as “Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff” but has been better known as mud, Voldemort and Who’s He at Bell offices ever since. (This is especially true for those who work as Bell lobbyists.)

Isenberg will just be one member of the agency’s National Broadband Task Force, one voice out of many. The FCC is also taking public comment online and holding hearings.

But at least his voice will be heard.

November 13th, 2009

Groklaw suggests Microsoft sue, do over authentication

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:05 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 12th, 2009

Broadcom goes open source and hell freezes over

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:22 am

Categories: GPL, General, Hardware, Linux, Linux Handheld, Strategy, VOIP, mobile, telecom, wireless

Tags: Broadcom Corp., Linux, Branding, Open Source, Sales Strategy, Operating Systems, Software, Marketing, Sales, Dana Blankenhorn

When the rock group Eagles broke up in 1980 they said they would get back together “when hell froze over.” They did get back together, in 1994. The album was called Hell Freezes Over.

Point is you can promise you will never do something — never, ever, ever — but business is business.

It’s with this in mind we find Broadcom making its BroadVoice voice codecs open source and royalty free under GPL V. 2.

GigaOM is wondering whether Broadcom isn’t just pushing for higher priced, higher quality voice from service providers using the codecs. I have another theory.

Broadcom saw its greatest success in pioneering relationships with Taiwanese OEMs. When other chip companies were offering these firms software and ecosystems, Broadcom offered them solutions, complete designs from brand names they could bang out for a quick profit.

What I saw at CompuTex this year was an enormous interest from these OEMs, whose ties to Chinese manufacturing are incredibly strong, to go “up the stack” of value, to own their own designs and create their own brand names.

They see this as an impossible dream on the desktop, but very possible in the handset business, a Broadcom niche. Systems like Android, LiMo and Symbian are open source, so the components going into them should also be open source. It’s the most effective way to compete with Apple.

In taking this route, the OEMs are explicitly rejecting Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, and this is a very big deal. This has nothing to do with the sales world they desire. They gave Microsoft all of the Netbook market and stuck Linux in a corner.

This Broadcom announcement is the best proof yet that the future of the handheld market is Linux.