Open Source > Linux > LQ
A quick update to this post. As of Tribe 5, both audio and wifi work flawlessly in the default configuration. With the manual installation of ThinkFinger for the biometric thumb scanner, absolutely everything on the machine is working as expected. I’m really liking the form factor of this laptop, it’s going to be great for conferences and travel.
–jeremy
(via Dave) It looks like LinuxWorld UK has been postponed:
It is with regret that we must announce that LinuxWorld Conference & Expo 2007 has been postponed until spring 2008.
We have reached this decision following feedback from potential sponsors and exhibitors who feel that the event is too close to the Linux Kernel Summit. By delaying the show, we will be able to ensure that the content and programme are a true reflection of the needs of the Linux and Open Source communities.
We hope to be in touch shortly with new dates.
I was really looking forward to going to London in October, so am a bit disappointed by the news. Citing crossover with the Linux Kernel Summit does seem a bit odd, as Dave points out. I’m seeing if I can get any additional information now.
–jeremy
It does seem as if Microsoft fears Open Source more than companies that are just as proprietary as Microsoft is. Matt has a potential explanation:
Now look at Oracle, SAP, IBM, etc. You won’t find a single other company making a concerted effort to fight open source. Not a one. Larry Ellison (Oracle) says open source is not something to be feared, but rather something “to be explained.” They clearly see open source as something to work with, and sometimes something to work through, but not something to destroy.
Sure, these and other proprietary-software companies occasionally dip into mudslinging against open source, but they don’t regularly buy analysts, set up anti-open source sites, rattle patent sabres, and generally insist on making a fetish out of open source’s demise.
Just Microsoft. Why?
I think it has a lot to do with how Microsoft chooses to make money. Microsoft, more than any other vendor listed (and many others that could be, like Autodesk, HP, Sybase, Salesforce.com, etc.), sells packaged software.
It relies, more than most companies, on a big, upfront license fee. At most vendors, such license fees barely pay for the cost of selling the product, causing them to rely on ongoing maintenance fees for their profits. So, whereas Oracle’s revenue stream looks not hugely dissimilar from an open-source revenue stream, Microsoft’s looks vastly different.
In short, Microsoft’s business and revenue model is threatened by open source much more than most proprietary software businesses.
When you look at current industry trends, both Open Source and closed source companies are relying more and more on maintenance and subscription revenues and less on pure licensing revenue. This means you have to provide continual value to your clients, or revenue starts to disappear. To me, that seems like how it should be. Matt continues:
Microsoft’s “house” is built on sand. The very factors that drove its success – easy-to-use, low-cost, integration between components – are the same things driving open source into the enterprise. Except that instead of lower cost, open source is free. Instead of integration of various components within the Microsoft-only ecosystem, open source’s open standards and open source code makes integration between disparate components – owned by different companies and communities – much easier than in the traditional proprietary world. And new open-source applications, operating systems, and middleware are heavily focused on customer value – including ease-of-use – which is challenging Microsoft on that front, as well.
Microsoft showed the way to beat the incumbent proprietary vendors, and its strategies are now being used against it by the open-source world. Except that this time, there’s one more huge value that Microsoft can never provide:
Freedom. Freedom from lock-in. Freedom to integrate and tweak and fiddle to make software work for the customer, because the vendors are no longer selling software. They’re selling service to make that software sing for the customer.
It’s very true, and somewhat ironic, that some of the strategies used by Microsoft are now being used against it. It shouldn’t be a surprise though – Microsoft does some things very well. The additional freedom from lock-in (and freedom in general) is the part that is going to turn the industry on its head though. For too long people in IT have been shackled. They’re getting a taste of freedom now and once you get that taste it’s painful to go back.
–jeremy
At LinuxQuestions.org, community feedback is absolutely critical to us. On that note, I’m happy to announce the LQ Project Tools, which will allow us to monitor community feedback, bug reports and feature requests in a much better way than we have in the past. If you have a suggestion on a project you’d like to see us undertake, have found a bug or have a feature suggestion, please let us know. We really do listen.
–jeremy
From Mark Webbink:
Some have speculated that it would be worthwhile to now take SCO off the market. Heck, their market cap is now under $10 million. The problem is that paying $10 million to buy SCO would not be the end of it. SCO is still embroiled in the IBM case and the Red Hat case, to say nothing of the on-going claims that Novell has. In addition, when the lights finally flicker out on SCO, look for some shareholder lawsuits based on violation of securities laws. If you go back to the press conferences that SCO repeatedly called back in 2003 and 2004, they never began those press conferences by making the standard disclaimers cautioning investors to take what they were saying with a grain of salt. As a consequence, investors had every right to take what Darl McBride and Chris Sontag were saying in public back then as the gospel truth. Like McBride stating publicly that SCO owned the copyrights to Unix in the spring of 2003 while he was privately corresponding with Novell begging them to transfer the copyrights to SCO.
We have come a long way from that day in 2003 when McBride suggested IBM buy SCO for $500 million.
I’d expect shareholder lawsuits once SCOX runs out of money and it looks like Darl McBride and Chris Sontag might end up getting a little more than they bargained for. It would have been nice to see this case make it all the way through to judgment, but it’s looking less and less likely that SCO will be able to hold out that long.
–jeremy
In what should come as no surprise, it looks like the discussion surrounding the Microsoft OSI submissions are getting a little cantankerous. From the article:
Another community member, Donovan Hawkins, doesn’t like the MS-PL’s requirement to keep its code separate from any other code licensed differently. “I can think of cases where I made MAJOR changes to some open-source function to use in a project,” he writes. “What sort of Frankenlicense would apply to that function if I wished to release my changes under GPL but the original was MPL or MSPL? Every other line of code under a different license?”
Things got really interesting when Chris DiBona, longtime OSI member, open source advocate, and open source programs manager for Google, Inc. chimed in:
I would like to ask what might be perceived as a diversion and maybe even a mean spirited one. Does this submission to the OSI mean that Microsoft will:
a) Stop using the market confusing term Shared Source
b) Not place these licenses and the other, clearly non-free , non-osd
licenses in the same place thus muddying the market further.
c) Continue its path of spreading misinformation about the nature of
open source software, especially that licensed under the GPL?
d) Stop threatening with patents and oem pricing manipulation schemes
to deter the use of open source software?
If not, why should the OSI approve of your efforts? That of a company who has called those who use the licenses that OSI purports to defend a communist or a cancer? Why should we see this seeking of approval as anything but yet another attack in the guise of friendliness?
That query got the attention of heretofore silent Bill Hilf, Microsoft’s general manager of platform strategy. “I’m unclear how some of your questions are related to our license submissions, which is what I believe this list and the submission process are designed to facilitate,” Hilf wrote. “You’re questioning things such as Microsoft’s marketing terms, press quotes, where we put licenses on our web site, and how we work with OEMs – none of which I could find at http://opensource.org/docs/osd. If you’d like to discuss this, I’d be happy to – and I have a number of questions for you about Google’s use of and intentions with open source software as well. But this is unrelated to the OSD compliance of a license, so I will do this off-list and preferably face to face or over the phone.”
Mee-ow!
Hilf went on to say that one of the reasons Microsoft coined the term “Shared Source” was “to acknowledge that these licenses had not been approved by the OSI, and some of our Shared Source licenses will not be submitted to the OSI.” But, Hilf wrote, “I’m open to make this more distinguishable on where/how we post the [licenses] on the Web site, if it’s important to the community.”
I’d guess this is going to get even more heated from here. The OSI may end up stuck between a rock and a hard place on this one. On the one side, it’s easy to argue that the entity submitting an entry should not even come into play and that a license should be approved or disapproved solely on its merit. On the other hand, some people reason that approving a license from an entity whom it’s perceived is out to harm Open Source is enabling them to do so, and therefor should not be done. That may be a slippery slope to walk on though. We certainly don’t want Open Source to become “whatever the OSI wants”, but at the same time we do need to trust the OSI to steward the Open Source label in the way they see fit. That is going to get interesting…
You can view the entire discussion here.
–jeremy
With all the recent talk of proprietary companies snatching up Open Source companies, it’s great to see a quality Open Source company aquire a quality Open Source project. I helped setup the original donation system for ClamAV and am happy Tomasz (who looks to be joining Sourcefire now) and the project have found a new home. That being said, Sourcefire remains an acquisition target in my mind… probably by a closed source company. Remember that their earlier acquisition by Checkpoint fell through. ClamAV is used by a huge number of commercial products, so it’ll be interesting to watch how things unfold in the next 18 months or so.
–jeremy
In case you’ve been hiding out the last couple days and hadn’t heard, Citrix has acquired XenSource for the lofty sum of $500m (which represents a truly astounding multiple, approached previously only by the likes of Skype and YouTube). This comes right on the heels of the $21b VMware IPO. In case you can’t tell, virtualization is hot. As Jonathan has noted, virtualization is actually going to be quite good for the industry, even if it seems a bit counterintuitive at the moment.
The following is directly from the press release:
Under Peter’s leadership, Citrix is also committed to maintaining and growing its support for the Xen open source community, led by XenSource co-founder and Xen project leader, Ian Pratt. Between now and the close of the acquisition, XenSource will work with the key contributors to the Xen project to develop procedures for independent oversight of the project, ensuring that it continues to operate with full transparency, fairness and vendor neutrality – principles that are critical to the continued role of Xen as a freely available open source industry standard for virtualization.
The acquisition will also strengthen each company’s strong partnership with Microsoft and commitment to the Windows platform. As an independent company, XenSource has built a strategic relationship with Microsoft designed to ensure broad interoperability between XenSource products and the upcoming Microsoft Windows hypervisor, code named “Viridian”. This relationship complements and broadens the successful partnership between Citrix and Microsoft in the Windows application delivery, application networking and branch office infrastructure markets.
It would seem to me that XenSource is going to spin Xen out as a distinct Open Source project and then align itself much more closely with Windows and Microsoft Virtualization in general (The CEO went as fas as to say “Our product focus is to provide the best Microsoft virtualization experience on the market”). With KVM and some other Linux virtualization projects making good headway recently it will be interesting to see how the various Enterprise Linux distributions respond. How that, in turn, will impact the general Xen project remains to be seen.
The other question I’ve seen raised is whether this acquisition multiple had much to do with XenSource being an “Open Source company”. Unfortunately, I’d say not really. It certainly didn’t hurt, but I’d guess the VMware IPO had more to do with it than the fact that Xen is an Open Source project. It seems clear that many smaller innovative Open Source based companies are going to be snatched up by proprietary companies as we move forward. It remains to be seen what long term impact this will have. I think it just reflects that Open Source is moving into the main stream. Some day I don’t think companies will have an “Open Source strategy” – it will just be an everyday part of business as usual. Others don’t have such a rosy outlook. Time will tell.
–jeremy
I’m happy to announce that after a slight delay, we’ve rolled out the most recent code upgrade to LinuxQuestions.org. You won’t see a huge difference at the site as the main layout remains unchanged. You should notice some performance and usability improvements, nice new features and more ajax sprinkled throughout (using the YUI library). A lot of what you can’t see, however, is behind the scenes. Some common items are now a bit easier for mods and this code base gives us a flexible framework to move forward with some other functionality we’d like to implement. Stay tuned. Thanks once again goes to David for his continued help at LQ.
–jeremy
MySQL AB has announced some changes in the way it handles the Community and Enterprise releases of MySQL. From the post:
The changes are in the areas of release policy and stability of MySQL Community Server and in the availability of MySQL Enterprise Server.
The changes start from the question: “How can we better target MySQL Community Server to the community and MySQL Enterprise Server to the paying customers?“. Many of them originate from our ongoing discussions with the Linux Distributions, some of whom have been distributing MySQL Enterprise Server to their user base, since MySQL Community Server hasn’t conformed to their needs of feature stability and release schedule.
Our intention is for MySQL Community Server to be very good, and for MySQL Enterprise Server to provide further value on top of that. The five changes, in short, are:
1. New features and community contributions will go into the next development tree. The new features will not be applied to a current GA release, ensuring stability for the Community Server. At the time of writing, the development tree is MySQL 5.2.
2. There will be at least two yearly “mature GA” (currently MySQL 5.0) binary builds. They aren’t scheduled, but usually triggered by grave security vulnerabilities.
3. When a version of MySQL initially goes GA (as 5.1 soon will), the company will release binary builds of the new GA product every month for a period of several months until it reaches a point of suitable stability/maturity to be considered a “mature GA” release — as described above.
4. There will be four yearly “mature GA” (currently MySQL 5.0) source releases, predictably scheduled, to be released once every quarter. These will be ideal for use by distributions shipping MySQL.
5. The current Enterprise source tarballs will be removed from ftp.mysql.com. These will move to enterprise.mysql.com, and will be available for our paying subscribers only.
This has sparked quite a few responses in the community, most of them negative. For one, it’s an extremely confusing setup that builds on what was already a confusing system. Second, it appears to go against what they are attempting to accomplish. Why would supposedly stable “Enterprise” builds be released more often and be tested by less people?
To me, that’s not the worst of it however. At least on the face of it, it seems like a bad business decision. Let me make one thing clear: I really like both MySQL the product and MySQL AB the company. They have done a ton for Open Source and I’d like nothing more than to see them make boat loads of money. The way I see it though, their adoption process is usually something along the lines of: technical person installs MySQL, something critical ends up getting implemented using it, managers insist on a support contract. Maybe what I’ve seen it not representative of the average MySQL sale, but if it is this move should prove quite bad for the bottom line. By making the Enterprise product harder to implement, it makes a support contract less likely in my mind. I thought they were trying to sell on value adds, such as support and monitoring. Is it possible that isn’t working and they are seeking other alternatives? If so, that’s worrisome. I trust that MySQL AB is watching the responses on this closely and really think in the end they’ll do the right thing, but I have to admit this is a little troubling. It’s a trend I’ve seen at a broader scale bubbling beneath the scenes and some interesting times could be ahead for “Enterprise Open Source”.
–jeremy
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