While lawyers debate the merits of the FSF’s suit against Cisco, open source developers may be asking themselves how they can make their views heard.

Here’s an idea. Boycott Cisco’s contest.

Cisco is running a contest, with a $100,000 prize fund, called “Think Inside the Box.” Its aim is to build Linux applications using Cisco’s Application Extension Platform (AXP).

Perhaps due to a lack of publicity entries have not been pouring in. The first phase entry deadline has been pushed back to February 27.

So here’s an idea.

Don’t enter. And let Cisco know why.

Companies are welcome to act as open source leeches if they wish, and if that behavior goes beyond the pale that’s what lawyers are for.

But here is a company being accused of stealing open source code on the one hand trying to buy the loyalties of open source programmers with the other.

Sure we could all use the money especially now. And it would be neat to jump-start what I call Always On applications which live in the air and require network resources.

But there are other ways to get there.

And what of those who do choose to enter? What of those who win? Should their own reputations within their open source communities suffer as a result?

Maybe. People are free to feel that way just as they are free to enter the contest and take Cisco’s money.

I’m interested in how readers feel about this. Should open source people shun Cisco until it gets right by the FSF? Or do we compartmentalize legal disputes and get on with the work?

First,  it elevates the server business, the high-end, the enterprise scaled stuff, to the top of the Microsoft stack. The old PC software company is becoming, in essence, a mainframe outfit. Which makes strategic sense.

IBM vs. Microsoft was the game three decades ago, and it’s going to be the game again. Muglia even looks like an IBM’er.

Second, Muglia is Microsoft’s cloud guy, their SaaS guy. A lot of companies are looking to desktop SaaS as a way to keep computing costs as flexible as salaries.

One market, one platform, one cloud. It’s a reasonable strategy.

Third, Muglia is seen as a “good cop” in regards to open source. By its nature cloud services obscure the differences between proprietary and open source. SaaS customers don’t even see their data, let alone their code. And don’t miss it.

Microsoft has been debilitated by its war with open source, and the best way to end that war is to make it irrelevant.

Microsoft has spent most of this decade flailing against open source, with no clear strategy for both opposing and appeasing it. Muglia’s rise could represent the start of creating one.

The better the competition becomes, the better it is for open source, and for computing in general.

Why would you want it in a cloud?

What if you wanted to develop for the Android and needed a working Android set-up, but were having trouble laying your hands on the hardware?

Or what if you needed to support customers using Android applications?

That’s the service DeviceAnywhere sells, and their latest move is to offer, not just an Android set-up, but an Android G1 set-up a la T-Mobile, on its Web site.

It’s a good business. The company presently claims to offer over 1,500 online handsets, configured for use by 30 different operators. Sign up and your virtual team can develop from anywhere.

In the case of Android, the move represents an important validation of the platform. It’s now on a par with every other phone set-up.

But it means more than that, since DeviceAnywhere also offers Mobile QoS monitoring and customer support services. Operators can help customers standing by, using the same set-ups as those customers.

One small step for DeviceAnywhere, one giant leap for Android development.

Since filing its GPL violation suit against Cisco last month, the Free Software Foundation has grown very quiet.

Christmas was a good excuse. New Year’s too. But the holidays are over, yet still not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse.

Thus reporters have been ordered to investigate the case. They called some lawyers, even some good ones, and see trouble ahead for the FSF.

Cisco has good lawyers. Any decision, even on the FSF’s terms, will then be used to limit rights under the GPL.

My guess is negotiations are continuing because neither side has a real incentive to go to court.

The language of any legal decision would likely be less clear than the clear language of the GPL 2. But if the GPL can be challenged successfully, so can every EULA out there — including Cisco’s own.

In my view the GPL 2 is one of the clearest legal documents ever written. As clear as the Constitution itself. Which has been litigated continuously since its adoption, with court decisions that often turned plain language into its opposite.

It’s like the difference between writing for a paper (or a blog) and writing an academic paper.

The latter may be dry and turgid, but it is specific, nailing down what prettier words might obscure. Most litigation seems to have the goal of turning plain language into academic language.

The difference between legal writing and academic writing is that the former always has wiggle room. Decisions depend on what the meaning of is is.

My guess is neither side wants to go down that rabbit hole. Cisco wants to save face, but the FSF won’t be played for a fool.

It’s time for Cisco to make a decision, because every day now costs the FSF money, which will raise the cost of a final settlement. Unless it wants its contribution to the economic stimulus to come in the form of legal fees.

That’s according to Gartner Group predictions for 2009, which claims that over the next few years most enterprises using open source won’t manage those assets correctly and most won’t achieve any cost savings over proprietary software. 

I’m late to the game here, but it’s worth pointing out two findings in the Gartner Predicts 2009 report, which was  published early last month:

Through the end of 2011, fewer than 50 percent of global IT organizations will have implemented a formal open source adoption and management policy.

And for the next five years, only about 50 percent of all mainstream IT projects using open source software will not achieve cost savings over closed source alternatives, according to the report’s author, Mark Driver.

The data serves as good warning for enterprise IT managers and CIOs, especially those who have stuck their necks out to support open source.

Gartner’s advise? In order to get a payoff, “move aggressively” to develop an open source adoption strategy and bring OSS and hardware under asset management systems.

“Do not expect to automatically save money with OSS or any technology without effective financial management,” Driver writes. “Do expect to carefully manage open source solutions in the appropriate scenarios to realize total cost of ownership advantages. ”

Imagine sitting down with your CEO in 2015 and explaining why the supposed cost savings of OSS never materialized with all of the energy and bucks put behind it?

Consolidation will vastly reduce the number of open source partners with whom customers do business.

Gartner predicts, for example, that by 2012, at least 50 percent of all direct commercial sales from open source products will come from projects under a single vendor’s patronage. Think about Red Hat, which scooped up JBoss. Think of Sun, which acquired mySQL? What’s in store for 2009?

On a good note, this may spread the use of open source (one throat to choke) and reduce the number of vendor relationships customers must support. But on the other hand, it may amass power into too few hands.

There was some good news in this otherwise  sobering report.

Through 2013, 90 percent of all cloud computing providers will rely on open source software to deliver products and services. this will no doubt stimulate more OSS sales and widespread use.

Gartner advises IT managers to manage their cloud and open source strategies together to maximize the potential of each. Tap into the ability of open source software to move workloads to the cloud, Driver also recommends in his to-do list for IT managers.
 

This may be one of the great misunderstandings of the open source era, and a big part of the FOSS-open source split.

Commercial open source, some think, does indeed  “appropriate returns from the commons.” I, on the other hand, believe such operations are a net benefit to the commons.

Let me offer the example of Acquia, the commercial arm for Drupal, because I have both personal experience and news to bring to bear.

The experience came four years ago. I was asked to help launch an open source site for politics. I recommended Drupal for its scalability, but the company failed, in part because we could not develop the site quickly enough.

Since Drupal.org only provided a directory of possible assistance, we wound up dealing with an Indian outsourcer my partner was familiar with.

Their claim of expertise was false. I spent months trying to explain what we needed, and each iteration of the software grew worse. We finally got things rolling after another consultant turned us on to the new, stable Drupal code base.

By then it was too late. The business model was flawed in any case. I wound up blogging about politics, reading political blogs and summarizing their messages, but traffic was never more than a trickle, and interactivity was virtually nil.

Should I get another opportunity, I will know more of what to do. I’ll be able to get the help I need through Acquia. I’ll pay for it, but I will have an effective site in a short period of time, and technical management will be done by techies, not journalists.

There’s a second benefit to the commercial model, add-ons. An example is Kaltura. This makes any Drupal site immediately video-capable. (There are also versions for other systems.)

A commercial arm retains a project’s market share, and its development momentum, so that add-ons gravitate toward it. I am certain that Drupal sites launched in 2009 will be light years ahead of those from four years ago.

They have to be, because much has happened since 2005. It’s no longer enough to support blogs, or diaries, or to do them in a scaled manner. Now you have to support a host of other files, and social networking functions.

A CMS system, like any system, must continually progress to stay relevant. Commercial arms help open source projects meet this competition, at the same time they provide a business model which feeds the lead developers.

It’s not an appropriation from the commons at all.

(Search Google images under “unholy Microsoft” and this is the first image that you get. From Vishal Sharma.)

Pinoy open source firm, MS ink unholy alliance.

Unholy, Sparky? Really? The story describes a deal between Winston Demarillo’s Exist Global and Microsoft to “enable the creation of more interoperable programs.”

The story adds that Microsoft is building two, not one but two, software labs in the country — in Quezon City and at the University of the Philippines.

Still, I couldn’t get that word out of my head. Unholy. Is open source really a holy business model, a holy contract? Is any company standing against it unclean, to be shunned?

Personally I just think they’re on the losing end, thanks to Moore’s Second Law. Software complexity increases exponentially with computing power. The only way to bring costs within reason, over time, is to share them.

So how do you feel when someone you know and respect in the open source movement announces they are doing business with Microsoft?

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Sourcelabs will now be part of a new personal storage unit of EMC called Decho, under former Microsoft executive Harel Kodesh, who has done a blog post heralding his own appointment.

What’s the strategy?

Will the SASH stack now become the management center of Decho’s online backup service?

Will Sourcelabs survive?

Does Kodesh have a special task in mind for Sourcelabs CEO Byron Sebastian and his team?

Or is it just possible EMC was looking for some open source mojo?

My guess is this was a rescue mission. The economic collapse was hitting Sourcelabs hard, the company was spinning in, and EMC saw a chance to get a good engineering team at a reasonable price. Sourcelabs and Decho are both in Seattle.

These are “Mr. Potter” days in the tech business. He who has the gold makes the rules. We dance to the tune of cash. While open source is based on principle, the principals can’t live on that alone.

EMC is shelter from the storm. We should all be so lucky in 2009.

As part of the roll-out we have a commercial affiliate, Cfengine.com, with fireworks on the home page and binaries you can buy. An enterprise edition is promised real soon now.

What sets Cfengine apart is a language in which you can build-in the procedures you would take if things went wrong. The new version adds support for Topic Maps, an XML schema making strategic intentions behind decisions easier to follow.

Cfengine has been around since 1993, and the company said it is taking an incremental approach to upgrades, so as to minimize system disruptions, which are its business.

If the business runs as smoothly as the software this gives open source a new card to play in the battle to manage large data centers and clouds. If Linux wins the top end of the market, it’s hard to see where Microsoft goes from there.

Back in October I suggested that the Android has to be more than an iPhone, has to be more than a phone actually:

What if someone built, say, a flash drive with the Android software that turned your PC into an Android device? Or turned your Linux-based Netbook into one?

It took an outfit called Mobile-Facts just four hours to get Android running on the Eee PC Netbook I reviewed last year. At the same time Google is rolling out a new version of the software, dubbed Cupcake, that is even more laptop-friendly.

This makes all sorts of sense. The key to Android’s success will be an innovative interface. Once you have that the platform is a matter of personal preference.

An Android Netbook would accomplish two things. It could give Linux market share inside the desktop market. And it would break Android from the death grip of the carrier business model.

As Jean Baptiste-Queru noted in a Google group discussion of Android, T-Mobile had HTC tweak its Android with proprietary components making it difficult if not impossible to upgrade.

This is standard operating procedure for both carriers and mobile phone makers. The more you can upgrade their kit the less kit you buy. Planned obsolescence is built into the business model.

But if Android is available in a Netbook form factor new worlds open up. Users can aid in development. WiFi becomes practical, indeed desireable. You can also have a continuing back-up of your Android data files.

You have a PC version of David Brin’s Kiln People, in that handhelds can now be made for specific tasks, then uploaded to the master and killed at will. In this case, of course, the clones live in the virtual carrier universe.

All these choices are up to you and available, when Android breaks free of a phone mindset.