Archive for June, 2007

May break down and get an iPhone

Published by
jeremy
at June 29, 2007 in Apple. 1 Comment

Against my better judgment and despite knowing better, I think I’m going to head over and see if I can get my hands on an iPhone. Will someone please come out with a decent Linux smartphone? I’d even settle for a Palm Treo that doesn’t have the form factor of a brick :) If I do get a hold of an iPhone, I’ll be sure to twitter the occasion. Seems apropos.

UPDATE: I am now the proud owner of an 8GB iPhone. The first impressions (I’ve not even opened it yet) are not very good. The store was woefully under prepared for one of the most hyped events ever. The provisioning system, OPUS, crashed almost immediately and the credit card system went down as well. My inquiry into a couple “iPhone only” rules were answered with “well, that’s how Apple wanted it”. When I pointed out that I was AT&T’s customer for the service, which is what my questions were about, that didn’t seem to matter. On to activation, I only have one non-Linux system and it is indeed a Mac. I just installed iTunes, only to find out that since I am running 10.3.9 the iPhone functionality doesn’t even work. He’s hoping iTunes runs in CrossOver. It still seems like an odd requirement to me to activate a mobile phone. I’ll post another update when (if?) I’m able to activate this thing.

–jeremy

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Ubuntu on Two New Inspirons

Published by
jeremy
at June 29, 2007 in Dell, Linux, Open Source and Ubuntu. 1 Comment

In a move that would seem to back up initial indications that the Ubuntu Dell offerings were selling well, Dell has officially announced that it is adding two additional models to its Linux lineup:

From a Ubuntu perspective, we’re now offering Ubuntu 7.04 to customers in the United States on the Inspiron 1420N notebook and the Inspiron 530N desktop. Both are available for order now at www.dell.com/open. Since these are new systems, it usually takes us a bit of time to ramp production. Because of that, we expect to ship these new systems by the middle of next month.

Additionally, Dell has confirmed that it plans to extend the Ubuntu roll-out to countries outside the United States (currently the number one request on IdeaStorm). Dell also indicated that they are considering bringing Linux to their small business customers. Great to see that the Ubuntu offering is being well received. This move could very well be paving the way to both additional large scale OEM Linux plans and someday even a simple “Linux on any model” type roll-out by someone. Kudos Dell.

–jeremy

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Red Hat CEO Says He Talked Patents with Microsoft II

Published by
jeremy
at June 29, 2007 in Linux, MSFT, Microsoft, Novell, Open Source and Red Hat. 3 Comments

A quick follow up on this post based on some questions/comments that I got via email. First, no - I absolutely don’t think Red Hat is currently in discussion with Microsoft to sign a Novell-style patent deal. Note the bolding. They may very well be in some kind of discussion, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. If Microsoft privately went to Red Hat with potential patent infringements, even silly unspecified ones, then Red Hat would be obligated to address the issue. That would require discussion. It’s very tough to be the CEO of a public company these days. “No comment” is very often the only answer you can give without the MSM twisting your words in all kinds of directions. Also note that Red Hat may be in talks about specific and valid patents or talks about something completely non-patent related. Who knows - speculation on this is mostly useless. I do remain confident though, that a Novell-esque deal will not come out of this. Don’t forget that RHT is fundamentally an Open Source company. It’s in their DNA and it’s reflected in their employees and culture. Novell had one or two key people leave after they signed the deal. Red Hat would have an exodus. The C-level execs at Red Hat know this. They get Open Source at a very fundamental level themselves, in fact. The following is the last official statement I could find from Red Hat on this topic. In the end, I have no reason to believe that sentiment has changed.

“Red Hat has only recently been able to see some of the terms of the original Microsoft/Novell deal, due to the belated and redacted SEC filings that were made. Based on what we have seen, the deal is not interesting to us. Red Hat continues to believe that open source and the innovation it represents should not be subject to an unsubstantiated tax that lacks transparency.”

–jeremy

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Red Hat CEO Says He Talked Patents with Microsoft

Published by
jeremy
at June 29, 2007 in Linux, Open Source and Red Hat. 1 Comment

It comes as absolutely no surprise that Microsoft approached Red Hat before any other Linux vendor (including Novell) about the patent agreement. It also comes as no surprise that a discussion took place and that no agreement was reached. Was is a bit of a surprise to me is:

The developer of Linux software, has yet to sign such a deal which could see Novell, its biggest rival, woo customers away from Red Hat and work on product development and sales with the world’s No.1 software maker.

In an interview with Reuters, Szulik declined to say whether his company is now in negotiations with Microsoft over signing such a patent agreement.

“I can’t answer the question,” he said.

When recently asked a similar question, Mark Shuttleworth gave an emphatic No:

For the record, let me state my position, and I think this is also roughly the position of Canonical and the Ubuntu Community Council though I haven’t caucused with the CC on this specifically.

We have declined to discuss any agreement with Microsoft under the threat of unspecified patent infringements.

Allegations of “infringement of unspecified patents” carry no weight whatsoever. We don’t think they have any legal merit, and they are no incentive for us to work with Microsoft on any of the wonderful things we could do together. A promise by Microsoft not to sue for infringement of unspecified patents has no value at all and is not worth paying for. It does not protect users from the real risk of a patent suit from a pure-IP-holder (Microsoft itself is regularly found to violate such patents and regularly settles such suits). People who pay protection money for that promise are likely living in a false sense of security.

Red Hat had also given a more deliberate “No” in the recent past, so the change of attitude to the “no comment” variety is a bit worrying. Here’s hoping that it’s just due to corporate disclosure rules (or something else innocuous) and not an actual change of opinion. Red Hat signing an “infringement of unspecified patents” type deal would be very bad IMHO.

–jeremy

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Ari Jaaksi on Nokia and Open Source and the N770

Published by
jeremy
at June 28, 2007 in Linux, Nokia and Open Source. 0 Comments

Stephe points to a white paper on Ari’s blog that details the early learnings at Nokia around open source and product delivery. This learning predominately focuses on the Nokia N770 and maemo project. The N770 is an “Internet Tablet” and is the predecessor to the N800, which I’m the proud owner of. If you’re unfamiliar with the N800, you can get an LQ branded look here.

The 10 page white paper is full of useful information and insight and is a worthwhile read in its entirety. Here are a few highlights.

On cost savings:

The biggest cost savings came from the utilization of already available components. We utilized several free components and subsystems as such, with no modifications.

We also improved several components to better meet our requirements. Such improvement is cheaper than creating the needed functionality from scratch.

Some 2/3 of the code of the Nokia 770 is licensed under an open source license. These components made it possible for us to build the software cheaper than we could have done using closed and proprietary technologies.

On code quality:
If we compare the code from open source to the code developed by us, our conclusion is that open source is of better quality. We have more bugs and problems in the Nokia developed code. This is only natural because the majority of the Nokia code is build from scratch and is thus very young. Open source code, on the other hand, has mostly been used by others already. They have fixed the most severe errors already before we started to use the code.

On engineering flexibility:
Open source is flexible when we needed to fix a problem or change functionality. We often requested bug fixes or modifications to the commercial closed components on our platform. If the vendors didn’t have the capacity or will to fix the problem on time, we had few options. We could not fix problems ourselves because the companies using closed source didn’t want us to access their source code. With open source components, though, we fixed bugs yourself, hired somebody else to fix them, or worked with the communities for the modifications. We thus had many options available, and in most cases we managed to fix the problems at hand. The free access to the code and to the developers improved the quality of open source originated components within the final product.

On confidentiality and the open source community:
We worked intensively with communities already before we announced the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. Open source approach requires openness and information sharing during development. A high publicity launch, on the other hand, is the way to introduce consumer products to the public and you do not want to reveal the products before the launch date. There is thus a potential conflict between the open source openness and product launch secrecy.

The credentials, work, and history of open source hackers are open for everybody to see. The hackers typically want to work with interesting things also in the future. Therefore, they don’t want to become famous for jeopardizing somebody else’s project and misusing their trust. Thus, openness and open source can actually be much stronger bond than any NDA or monetary sanction one can put on an individual or a company.

Based on our experiences, we can combine open communication and product confidentiality. We had no information leakage prior to the commercial product announcements, although we had had tens of developers working on the software with us. For some of the developers, we had told very detailed information about the forthcoming product. Developing products in open source and yet maintain the confidentiality of the product plans and roadmaps was possible for us.

and a summary:
Our experiences demonstrate that open source technologies and development model suit very well for such devices. We created the product in shorter time and with lesser resources that we have managed to develop other products utilizing proprietary software. In essence, open source offers time and cost savings in a form of readily available components and subsystems, available developers, and effective development model.

It was clear at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit that Linux in the mobile space is going to be huge. Even though Nokia has a serious investment in Symbian, they are exploring what the future holds for mobile Linux. That future looks very bright.

–jeremy

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Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma says iPhone will fail

Published by
jeremy
at June 28, 2007 in Apple and Google. 0 Comments

The iPhone has to be one of the most hyped devices I’ve seen in a long time. Many of the reviews so far seem to indicate that the device actually lives up to the hype, which is no small feat. It’s interesting to see that Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma predicts that the iPhone should fail:

Who or what do you think will disrupt Google (GOOG) or Apple (AAPL)?

It’s hard for me to see what will disrupt Google. I think they’ve got a pretty good run ahead of them. Chapters five and six of The Innovator’s Solution describe how at the beginning phases of the industry, in order to play that game successfully you really need to have a proprietary, optimized, end-to-end architecture to your product.

Apple sure has that.

That’s why they’ve been successful. But just watch the [competitors'] advertisements that you hear for the ability to download music onto your mobile phone. Music on the mobile phone has to be downloaded in an open architecture way from Yahoo! Music or someplace else [other than iTunes]. Which means it’s clunkier, not as good. Mobile phones don’t have as much storage capacity, nor are their interfaces as intuitive [as iPods]. But for some folks, they’re good enough, and the trajectories [of people using their phone as a medium for listening to music] just keep getting better and better.

So music on the mobile phone is going to disrupt the iPod? But Apple’s just about to launch the iPhone.
The iPhone is a sustaining technology relative to Nokia. In other words, Apple is leaping ahead on the sustaining curve [by building a better phone]. But the prediction of the theory would be that Apple won’t succeed with the iPhone. They’ve launched an innovation that the existing players in the industry are heavily motivated to beat: It’s not [truly] disruptive. History speaks pretty loudly on that, that the probability of success is going to be limited.

I’ll be heading over to the Apple store at about 6PM tomorrow to see if I can get my hands on ones of these. If I do, I’ll be sure to post a review here with my thoughts.

–jeremy

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Top 500 Supercomputer OS Share

Published by
jeremy
at June 28, 2007 in Linux and Open Source. 0 Comments

Top500 has released its latest Supercomputer list and Linux now represents over 75% of the top 500. That means 389 (or 77.80%) of the fastest (reported) supercomputers in the world run some Linux variant. That’s up from 65.20% in November of 2006. Windows made what I believe is its first appearance on the list, but according to this article that machine has been “rebooted as a Linux cluster”.

–jeremy

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Google Desktop is now available for Linux

Published by
jeremy
at June 28, 2007 in Google, Linux, Linux Foundation and Open Source. 0 Comments

At the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, it was alluded to by a few Googlers that more Google Linux apps were coming “real soon now”. Making good on that quickly, Google just released the Google Desktop for Linux. While it is a native app, it’s not Open Source. It would be interesting to see a side-by-side comparison of this and Beagle (which I admit to not using). It’s good to see that, unlike in many cases, the Linux version looks to be an exact feature match with the Windows and OS X versions. At this point I think SketchUp and Notifier are the only two Google apps left without some kind of Linux version available.

–jeremy

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Windows Vista - 6 Month Vulnerability Report

Published by
jeremy
at June 22, 2007 in Linux, Microsoft and Open Source. 1 Comment

Jeff Jones, a Security Strategy Director in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, recently posted a 6 Month Vulnerability Report that compares Windows Vista, Windows XP, RHEL WS 4, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, Novell SLED 10 and Apple OS X 10.4. Jeff has pointed out his potential bias, so I won’t even get into that angle. This report indeed does a better job than some from a methodology standpoint. For instance, he didn’t simply compare a default RHEL install, which includes a full Office suite and a whole host of apps not found in a default Windows install, with a default Windows install. He attempted to rip out the packages from the Linux installs that he perceived as being extra functionality when compared to a Windows install. This gives a much better baseline.

I’d like to simply offer a couple items that I think make reports like these a bit misleading. First, there is no standard definition of what a “Critical” or “High” security level is. It’s usually up to the vendor. It’s therefore possible that some vendors would rate nearly identical vulnerabilities with different severities. Second (and more importantly), we’re of course only looking at reported vulnerabilities here. Due to the Open Source nature of Linux, it’s much more likely that vulnerabilities will be discovered, reported and addressed. I’d contend that there are many more unreported vulnerabilities (which can be and in fact are still exploited) in proprietary software. If done again, another component I’d like to see added is average time to fix from time of first report. I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that there are points that can easily be made for the flip side of the coin. The obvious one is that with a much larger install base, many more people will be targeting XP and Vista than other operating systems. In the end, statistics can almost always be made to say whatever you’d like.

–jeremy

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Will The Real Open Source CRM Please Stand Up?

Published by
jeremy
at June 21, 2007 in OSI and Open Source. 1 Comment

Michael has addressed an issue that has been stewing for a while (and one I have covered on this blog quite a bit). From his post:

Dana Blankenhorn’s story How far can open source CRM get? has finally pushed me to respond to the many people who have asked “When is the OSI going to stand up to companies who are flagrantly abusing the term ‘open source’?” The answer is: starting today.

I am not going to start by flaming Dana. As President of the Open Source Initiative, I feel a certain amount of responsibility for stewardship of the open source brand, including both the promotion of the brand as well as the protection of the brand. The topic of “what is really open source and what is not?” has been simmering for quite some time. And until last year the question was trivial to answer, and the answer provided a trivial fix. But things have changed, and its time to regain our turf.

He continues:

So here’s what I propose: let’s all agree–vendors, press, analysts, and others who identify themselves as community members–to use the term ‘open source’ to refer to software licensed under an OSI-approved license. If no company can be successful by selling a CRM solution licensed under an OSI-approved license, then OSI (and the open source movement) should take the heat for promoting a model that is not sustainable in a free market economy. We can treat that case as a bug, and together we can work (with many eyes) to discern what it is about the existing open source definition or open source licenses made CRM a failure when so many other applications are flourishing. But just because a CEO thinks his company will be more successful by promoting proprietary software as open source doesn’t teach anything about the true value of open source. Hey–if people want to try something that’s not open source, great! But let them call it something else, as Microsoft has done with Shared Source. We should never put the customer in a position where they cannot trust the term open source to mean anything because some company and their investors would rather make a quick buck than an honest one, or because they believe more strongly in their own story than the story we’ve been creating together for the past twenty years. We are better than that. We have been successful over the past twenty years because we have been better than that. We have built a well-deserved reputation, and we shouldn’t allow others to trade the reputation we earned for a few pieces of silver.

Open Source has grown up. Now it is time for us to stand up. I believe that when we do, the vendors who ignore our norms will suddenly recognize that they really do need to make a choice: to label their software correctly and honestly, or to license it with an OSI-approved license that matches their open source label. And when they choose the latter, I’ll give them a shout out, as history shows.

Please join me, stand up, and make your voice heard–enough is enough.

I think most of us in the community agree that some companies are completely and utterly abusing the words Open Source. I’d guess some of it is intentional and some of it is not. In both cases though, it hurts us all. It creates confusion, mistrust and more. However, with the proliferation of companies that are absolutely not proprietary but also not quite OSD-level, I think it’s in the OSI’s best interest to come up with a taxonomy that properly addresses the issue. Without that, you’re telling some very well meaning companies that do a lot of good for the greater OSS community to go away. While I (and, of course many of you) believe strongly in Open Source it is still a bit of a leap of faith for many (and one need look no further than threads like this to see how much confusion and misunderstanding is still out there). Once a proper taxonomy is in place I think action should be both swift and comprehensive. Companies on the fringe can be made aware of the new taxonomy and where they fall. At that point the only violators left will be of the intentional and malicious sort, so they can be dealt with in a harsh way with little chance of collateral damage.

Open Source. Those two words mean so much. It’s important we protect them. It’s also important that protection comes in a way that’s congruent with the community spirit.

–jeremy

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