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Archive for the 'Google' Category

Introducing the Google Chrome OS

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at July 8, 2009 in Android, Google, Linux and Open Source. 0 Comments

After years of speculation, Google has officially announced its intentions for a “Google OS”. From the press release:

It’s been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

It basically sounds as though Chrome OS will be a very light weight Linux that can boot extremely quickly and is designed to run the Chrome browser quickly and efficiently. The details beyond that are unfortunately extremely light at this point. It’s a bit ironic that Chrome OS is based on Linux while Linux support in Chrome has considerably lagged Windows and OS X support thus far. My initial thought was, why Chrome OS in addition to Android. They touch on that in the press release:

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

It seems to me there will be quite a bit of overlap, but we’ll have to see what direction Google takes both Chrome OS and Android before we can tell for sure. You have to assume that much of the Chrome OS experience will actually take place in the cloud, which could get interesting but poses a variety of stumbling points, of which privacy and security will be major ones. Another pain point is what the experience will be like when you go offline (which happens quite a bit, despite what some people attempt to tell you). Keep in mind that Chrome OS isn’t scheduled to launch for almost a full year. A lot can happen in that time, but this announcement should be seen as a bright spot for Linux in general. Google could have chosen anything to build this on top off. The fact that they continually build products on top of Open Source software should be seen as a testament to the quality of that software. Whether Google will be able to bring Linux to the masses where others have failed remains to be seen, but between Chrome OS and Android they’re certainly trying. Privacy issues (which far too many people ignore) aside, Chrome OS + Gears + HTML5 + Wave + whatever technology drops in the next 12 months certainly has the potential to be an extremely compelling combo. It’s certainly something I’ll be keeping my eye on.

–jeremy

Additional reading:

WSJ
TechDirt
NYT
TechCrunch
RedMonk

MySQL: Now and Then… and Dual License Community Impact

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jeremy

at December 24, 2008 in Google, MySQL, Open Source and Sun. 1 Comment

Stephen O’Grady recently posted a Q&A pertaining to the past, present, and future of MySQL. There’s been quite a bit going on at MySQL and Sun lately, but I’ll focus on one issue in this post – the impact of the current MySQL dual-licensing strategy. Stephen covers much more in his post, and I will be posting some additional MySQL-related thoughts soon. From the linked post:

A: Well, let’s remember what the dual license mechanism is and how it works. Here’s a basic description I wrote a while back:

A single entity such as MySQL is responsible for the overwhelming majority of all development on a given codebase. Anything they don’t produce themselves, they license. Very often this is practiced in conjunction with the dual-license model; because MySQL is responsible for virtually all of the development of the core code, they own or have licensed appropriately all of the involved IP. As such, they’re free to issue commercial licenses to those who would cannot or choose not to comply with the terms of the open source license – the GPL, in this case.

Generally, this model has served MySQL fairly well. By controlling the intellectual property, they retain the rights to relicense the code, thus protecting a revenue stream. They also were afforded a slightly greater protection from forks versus more collaboratively developed projects like Linux, in that they – theoretically – employed the majority of the people qualified and paid to work on the codebase at the lowest levels. But let’s come back to that.

What’s the catch to the model? In part, it’s that the burden of development is born almost entirely by the MySQL staff, but the more relevant concern here is the inability to consume external contributions – even if they’re excellent – without licensing them.

Stated more simply: as long as MySQL remains committed to the dual licensing model, it will be unable to accept the same patch set that open source only versions of the code can, because they do not share the same licensing concerns. Which is why we’ve seen these spring up, and possibly why the MySQL-derived Drizzle project has taken a different approach from its parent.

For a long time, most viewed the control that MySQL AB had as a strength, at least from a business perspective. With the high quality work that is now going on outside MySQL/Sun, however, that is increasingly not the case. Percona, Proven Scaling, OurDelta, Google and others are doing some really cool things these days. The current thinking for many is that the best bang for the buck when it comes to MySQL is now outside MySQL. That’s never happened before and I think it shifts the entire MySQL landscape. The question for Sun now becomes: when will the ability to consume external contributions outweigh the perceived benefits of the dual-license strategy that inhibits the consumption of those contributions? While Drizzle may change some of this, I think it’s a question Sun is going to have to answer (for its own good) sooner… rather than later.

–jeremy

Linux popularity across the globe

Published by

jeremy

at August 21, 2008 in Google and Linux. 1 Comment

Royal Pingdom has posted some interesting stats about Linux popularity across the globe, based on Google Insights for Search. From the post:

Some interesting observations

* Ubuntu is most popular in Italy and Cuba.
* OpenSUSE is most popular in Russia and the Czech Republic.
* Red Hat is most popular in Bangladesh and Nepal.
* Debian is most popular in Cuba.
* Cuba is in the top five (interest-wise) of three of the eight distributions in this survey.
* Indonesia is in the top five of four of the distributions.
* Russia and the Czech Republic are in the top five of five of the distributions.
* The United States is not in the top five of any of the distributions.

As an example, here’s the chart for here’s the chart for “Linux popularity in the United States”:

View the full post for more information.

–jeremy

Apple iPhone 2.0 Upgrade == FAIL

Published by

jeremy

at July 11, 2008 in Apple, Google and iPhone. 5 Comments

A note to Apple. I find it astonishing that you have created an upgrade procedure that can fail in a way that leaves the phone useless. You had 6+ months to prepare for this, so error messages like this are just inexcusable. Google, please hurry up with Android

–jeremy

Opening up Symbian – Good or Bad for Linux?

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jeremy

at June 30, 2008 in Google, Linux, Nokia, Open Source, iPhone and maemo. 0 Comments

That’s the question raised by this recent Nokia press release:

Espoo, Finland – Nokia today announced it has launched a cash offer to acquire all of the shares of Symbian Limited that Nokia does not already own, at a price of EUR 3.647 per share. The net cash outlay from Nokia to purchase the approximately 52% of Symbian Limited shares it does not already own will be approximately EUR 264 million.

The acquisition is a fundamental step in the establishment of the Symbian Foundation, announced today by Nokia, together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Motorola, NTT DOCOMO, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone. More information about the planned foundation can be found at www.symbianfoundation.org.

From the Symbian Foundation site:

The Symbian Foundation platform will be available to members under a royalty-free license from this non-profit foundation. The Symbian Foundation will provide, manage and unify the platform for its members. Also, it will commit to moving the platform to open source during the next two years, with the intent to use the Eclipse Public License. This will make the platform code available to all for free, bringing additional innovation to the platform and engaging even a broader community in future developments.

Keep in mind that while not a huge success in the US, Symbian does still account for about 60% of all smartphones, with the next OS a distant second at about 15%. So, what does this mean for mobile Linux? It’s still unclear to me the direction Nokia will take, so it’s hard to tell. They are all over the place at the moment. The have the GTK based maemo project, have recently acquired TrollTech for QT and now have an Open Source Symbian. Long term, they can’t possibly want to support all three of these. Looking at Symbian specifically, I’m not sure it can compete directly with the likes of the iPhone and Android. The UI looks old and clunky and it doesn’t have a lot of the functionality and polish of the newer mobile offerings. That said, developers know it, it has a huge application catalog and an entrenched base. Whether that will be enough for Symbian to make it out of the Open Source process alive remains to be seen though, and in my opinion it isn’t a certainty. What Nokia does get is 1) options and 2) the perception that they are not sitting on their hands while Android and the iPhone pass it by. Even if Symbian can’t compete feature for feature with something like Android, this announce will serve to remove one of its key advantages. That alone is likely worth the investment to Nokia.

Further Reading:
Linux Foundation
Red Monk
SAI

–jeremy

Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo in $44.6 billion deal

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jeremy

at February 1, 2008 in Google and Microsoft. 0 Comments

It’s been rumored on and off for years now, but Microsoft just made an unsolicited $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo. The bid, which would consist of cash and Microsoft stock, values Yahoo shares at $31 a share, a 62% premium on Thursdays closing price. More analysis here. Yahoo has rebuffed Microsoft in the past, but this time the offer might be one they can’t refuse. The price of YHOO stock after the announcement indicates the market thinks there is a high probability of a deal. This deal is clearly about Microsoft not being able to compete with Google, and not being too happy about that. Ironically, I don’t think this deal will help them compete any better. On the other hand, Yahoo has been a huge friend to Open Source. In addition to things like YUI (which we use at LQ) and Hadoop, they acquired a great company in Zimbra. To me, Zimbra is one of the only real long term threats to Exchange. Unfortunately, I’m not quite as optimistic as Matt about the future of some of these Open Source initiatives if Microsoft were to take over. I’m not sure companies like Flickr, del.icio.us, MyBlogLog, Zimbra and others would have sold to Microsoft… and for good reason. The cultures at Yahoo! and Microsoft are just entirely different. Concerns like that sometimes go out the windows when $44B is on the table though. Long term, I think Yahoo could probably offer more shareholder value alone than as part of Microsoft. The market doesn’t really think long term anymore, however, and in the short term Yahoo is hurting.

–jeremy

Lessons from Google and Red Hat for Facebook and Open Source

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jeremy

at November 19, 2007 in Google, Open Source and Red Hat. 0 Comments

Matt has articulated something I’ve tried to explain to people many times. From his post:

Twentieth century software business models focus on scarcity because they’re founded upon 20th century conceptions of property (actually, their origin is a few centuries’ older than that, but never mind).

Scarcity is the absolute wrong way to build a software business in the 21st century, with the rise of digitization. It is pointless and fruitless to insist that the digital world act like the physical or analog world, and build business models that conform to this false view. To thrive in the new software world, we need to embrace its changes rather than fight them.

The old model was to assume that the value was in the software itself and to therefore lock it up. It turns out, however, as Tim O’Reilly notes, that data is the real value, not bits and bytes. You don’t discover or, rather, uncover, that value until you have abundance.

There will be a few companies that continue to effectively monetize the old world. Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, and SAP, to name the four primary ones. But these outdated models will eventually fall against the rising tide of abundance-based business models, because the new models recognize that digital bits really do want to be free, and that all attempts to artificially lock them are doomed to fail.

It fascinates me how many companies still operate under the guise of artificial scarcity. The landscape is rapidly changing and the shift is so large and fundamental that it seems some are completely missing it. That’s not all that surprising in the end, but as with most industry paradigm shifts, at least one seemingly invincible player will almost invariably not survive.

–jeremy

Where’s my Gphone?

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jeremy

at November 5, 2007 in Apple, Google, Linux, Nokia, Open Source, OpenMoko and maemo. 0 Comments

Google finally made the highly anticipated Gphone related announcement today:

Despite all of the very interesting speculation over the last few months, we’re not announcing a Gphone. However, we think what we are announcing — the Open Handset Alliance and Android — is more significant and ambitious than a single phone. In fact, through the joint efforts of the members of the Open Handset Alliance, we hope Android will be the foundation for many new phones and will create an entirely new mobile experience for users, with new applications and new capabilities we can’t imagine today.

Android is the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices. It includes an operating system, user-interface and applications — all of the software to run a mobile phone, but without the proprietary obstacles that have hindered mobile innovation. We have developed Android in cooperation with the Open Handset Alliance, which consists of more than 30 technology and mobile leaders including Motorola, Qualcomm, HTC and T-Mobile. Through deep partnerships with carriers, device manufacturers, developers, and others, we hope to enable an open ecosystem for the mobile world by creating a standard, open mobile software platform. We think the result will ultimately be a better and faster pace for innovation that will give mobile customers unforeseen applications and capabilities.

It’s important to recognize that the Open Handset Alliance and Android have the potential to be major changes from the status quo — one which will take patience and much investment by the various players before you’ll see the first benefits. But we feel the potential gains for mobile customers around the world are worth the effort. If you’re a developer and this approach sounds exciting, give us a week or so and we’ll have an SDK available. If you’re a mobile user, you’ll have to wait a little longer, but some of our partners are targeting the second half of 2008 to ship phones based on the Android platform. And if you already have a phone you know and love, check out mobile.google.com and make sure you have Google Maps for mobile, Gmail and our other great applications on your phone. We’ll continue to make these services better and add plenty of exciting new features, applications and services, too.

This is fairly inline with what I was expecting. While some were anticipating a hardware device from Google, a platform plus stack release makes much more sense. They don’t have to get into a very low margin high capital business and they can keep existing partnerships in place without the added stress of direct competition. This move should have fairly large repercussion for the entire industry. With the availability of a full SDK for this platform, Apple is really going to get hurt if they are too closed with their SDK, which will be released soon. Looking at the Open Handset Alliance members, you’ll notice both Nokia and FIC are missing. You have to wonder how this announcement will impact Maemo and OpenMoko, respectively. I’d guess we’ll see many more partners and stepped up competition as a result of this announcement, so I’ll keep an eye out and post an update when the dust has settled. One thing is clear, the Linux mobile landscape is heating up.

Additional Reading:
TechCrunch
Edgadget
Mashable
Techdirt
Linux Foundation (which has pointers to many of the Linux mobile initiatives and players, including: ACCESS, A La Mobile, Celunite, FST, Mizi Research, OpenMoko/FIC, Purple Labs, Trolltech, LiMO, LiPS, Moblin and more)

–jeremy

Some LinuxQuestions.org Stats

Published by

jeremy

at November 1, 2007 in Adobe, Apple, Firefox, Google, Linux, LinuxQuestions.org, Microsoft and Sun. 0 Comments

Every once and a while I like to post a quick update that includes some stats about LQ. Here are a couple for the month of October 2007.

Browsers
* A total of 277 distinct Browsers visited LQ last month. Those with more than 1%:

Firefox	61.99%
IE	24.14%
Mozilla	5.50%
Opera	4.29%
Konqueror	2.18%
Safari	1.53%

Operating Systems
* A total of 23 distinct Operating Systems visited LQ last month. Those with more than 1%:

Windows	52.99%
Linux	43.09%
Macintosh	3.10%

Browser and OS combo
* The top 5 Browser/OS combos are:

Firefox / Linux	33.24%
Firefox / Windows	26.66%
IE / Windows	23.84%
Mozilla / Linux	5.33%
Opera / Linux	2.30%
Konqueror / Linux	2.30%

RSS feed
* The RSS feed with the most subscribers is LQ Latest Threads. RSS readers with more than 1%

Google Feedfetcher	77%
Google Desktop	10%
Firefox Live Bookmarks	3%
Firefox Live Bookmarks (Version 1)	2%
Bloglines	1%
MyYahoo	1%

Random
* 95.51% of visitors had Java support
* 88.29% of visitors had Flash support
* 97% browse with a screen resolution 1024×768 or greater

LQ is certainly not representative of the web as a whole, but interesting nonetheless. Enjoy.

–jeremy

Open Source and the Future of Network Applications

Published by

jeremy

at July 29, 2007 in Google, OSCON and Open Source. 0 Comments

There’s a lot to see at OSCON, so it should come as no surprise that you won’t be able to personally see everything you’d like to. I seem to have missed one of the most talked about events though.

“Tim has a television show under production where we get told in advance what we are going to say and how it will reflect Tim’s underlying idea,” Moglen told us. “I decided not to go with the program.”

Moglen’s performance turned into the stuff of legend.

Regrettably, we missed the assault. Stories needed to go out, and we assumed the chat would follow familiar, boring lines. After about ten people later asked if we caught the spectacular show, The Register contacted the OSCON audio staff to obtain a recording of the session. “No problem,” they said, “It will just take a couple of minutes, but you need to get O’Reilly’s permission first.” O’Reilly corporate refused to release the audio, saying it would cause a slippery slope. (We’re still trying to understand that one.) They, however, did add that Moglen appeared to be “off his meds.”

So what exactly happened?

Moglen attacked O’Reilly for wasting his time promoting Web 2.0 darlings, when he should be focusing on the core issues crucial to free software.

“I decided to say that we’ve reached a stage where we ought to be able to tell the difference between daily business news – X is up, Y is down – and the stuff that really matters, which from day-to-day is not racehorse X is running faster than racehorse Y.

“I think what time has done with this forum in general is to emphasize the trivial at the expense of the significant.”

According to published reports, Moglen described O’Reilly’s current approach to open source software as “frivolous.” He also chastised O’Reilly for chasing money, billionaire chums and “thermal noise” like Facebook.

“We still have serious problems to correct in public policies made by people propping up business models that were dying and wasting time promoting commercial products,” Moglen said, during the session.

As Stephen O’grady points out, you may not agree with the tactics Eben used (I also don’t), but the conversation is an extremely important one.

First and most obviously, this is a call to arms. Join us, pleads Joyent, before we trade one dictatorship for another. Underlying the recruiting attempt, however, are a set of implicit assumptions worth extracting.

1. Microsoft’s desktop dominance is threatened
2. The primary source of the threat is free but non-open source SaaS offerings from Google, MSN, Yahoo
3. The predicted outcome will see users forced to trade one dominant provider for another
4. Open source is the last, best defense against that future

Speculative and reactionary though these comments may be, they are reasonable enough in my opinion to be warrant further debate. But not here, and not now.

Suffice it to say, for time being, that the Joyent folks are not the only ones concerned by the prospect of future technology landscape dominated by the likes of Amazon, Google, eBay, Yahoo, et al. As evidenced by developments like Joyent’s decision and the GNOME Online Desktop efforts, it’s increasingly apparent that open source and Web 2.0 are on a collision course.

While these two dominant technical trends or directions have much to learn from each other, the convergence is likely to have its painful moments if OSCON is any indication. Indeed the talk of the conference was the somewhat shocking public swipe at Tim O’Reilly by one of the GPLv3’s chief architects, Eben Moglen. As documented elsewhere, Moglen absolutely dropped the hammer on Mr. Web 2.0, arguing that “that the FSF has ‘done the heavy lifting’ and ‘carried your water’ for the last decade, and that the era of Web 2.0 distraction (buzz about who is making money, who will get acquired, etc) will need to be replaced by a serious conversation about freedom.”

We’re still in the early stages of this discussion, but it’s encouraging to see that the right people are paying attention and the issues are slowly being iterated through. The right questions are starting to be asked. There’s still a lot to decide and much debate will surely follow, so if this is a topic that interests you (and it should be), make sure to join the conversation.

–jeremy

Jeremy’s Blog

Archive for the 'Google' Category

Introducing the Google Chrome OS

MySQL: Now and Then… and Dual License Community Impact

Linux popularity across the globe

Apple iPhone 2.0 Upgrade == FAIL

Opening up Symbian – Good or Bad for Linux?

Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo in $44.6 billion deal

Lessons from Google and Red Hat for Facebook and Open Source

Where’s my Gphone?

Some LinuxQuestions.org Stats

Open Source and the Future of Network Applications

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