Archive for the 'Linux' Category

The OpenSolaris Community v2: Prepare Yourself

Published by
jeremy
at May 2, 2008 in Linux, Open Source and Sun. 0 Comments

Sun is a company I plan on covering a bit more as they continue to delve deeper into Open Source. I’ve commented on the current messaging issue Sun has around its Open Source participation previously. I haven’t been following Open Solaris as much as I’d have liked, but this post by Ben gets you up to speed on the current situation:

Ian Murdock’s distro formly known as “Indiana” will be birthed as “OpenSolaris” in less than a week, being debuted at CommunityOne on May 5th. This will be a major landmark even in the history of Solaris, right up there with the BSD-to-SysV transition and release of the code. There is no talk at Sun regarding Solaris 11, when pushed the only quote I get is “over my dead body”, apparently coming from high within the organization. While no one will clarify on the situation, the current vibe seems to be that Solaris 10 will be with us for a very long time, in update purgatory, while the future revolves around the OpenSolaris distribution. Ultimately the decision will probly be made by Sun’s attempts to get ISV’s behind OpenSolaris… but this is only my hunch, I’ll continue pushing Sun to clarify the roadmap, perhaps at CommunityOne will learn more.

… Its time for a community reset. With the release of the OpenSolaris distro the last bits of the community started by Andy Tucker and Claire Giordano will be, in my view, gone away. The experiment in community official ended and replaced. Rather than the community being joint owners of Solaris it will be affirmed that Sun is firmly staying at the helm and we’re free to board the train and pitch in if we choose. Those of us fighting against the tide are now presented with a choice… give up and try to re-invent our roles in the “new reality” or continue to fight the inevitable like so many of those in our community who still whine if an OS doesn’t run on an i386 with 512K of RAM looking like a senile prick.

It seems clear to me that Sun is not going to give up full control of Open Solaris. To be fair, Red Hat didn’t go as open with Fedora as was initially assumed either. In the end, much of it comes down to how Sun perceives Solaris driving its bottom line. It used to be that Solaris sold expensive SPARC hardware. That’s not as much the case any more. Where that leaves Solaris is unclear to me. Sun is still driving innovation - you need look no further than DTrace and ZFS to see evidence of that. Does that sell enough Sun hardware to justify the engineering costs associated with Solaris? I don’t know, but at some point Sun is going to have to look very at that question and they may not like the answer they get.

While catching up on Open Solaris, I also came across two good posts by Ted. In What Sun was trying to do with Open Solaris he looks into what kinds of participation Sun was originally looking for when they launched Open Solaris. His Organic vs. Non-organic Open Source follow up delves into a Brian Aker comment about projects moving between “organic” and “non-organic” (or in the case of Solaris->Open Solaris, moving between proprietary and either organic/non-organic Open Source). These kind of issues are going to be getting more and more scrutiny if I had to guess, as more and more commercial Open Source companies are going to have to figure out their business models and hit revenue goals. The commercial Open Source space is starting to mature, and I don’t think some people are going to like it.

–jeremy

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OLPC’s New President & Negroponte: Its a Laptop Project Now

Published by
jeremy
at May 2, 2008 in Linux and Open Source. 0 Comments

It’s a bit sad to see the new direction the OLPC project may be taking. The Open Source community has put a lot into the project, not only from a technical standpoint but from a marketing one as well. I think many of us thought that Open Source was baked in and part of what was needed for the project to obtain its goals. It’s becoming clear that’s not the case and the project has already seen some high profile departures. For my part, LQ was one of the first “give one get one” customers and we promoted it fairly heavily at conferences and online. I really agreed with the original goals of the project. It seems things are starting to unravel a bit and it will be a shame if things don’t work out as originally planned.

–jeremy

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Lug Radio Live US

Published by
jeremy
at April 15, 2008 in Linux and Open Source. 0 Comments

The first Lug Radio Live in the US was held over the weekend. I was both an attendee and a sponsor, and think the event went extremely well (especially when you consider it was a first and put on by 4 people that reside on a different continent). I’d guess Cat and Leslie from Google had a lot to do with that. The speaking lineup was both interesting and entertaining, with some presentations that I don’t think you’ll see at any other event. LRL is fairly informal, which gives it a pretty unique flavor all its own. I’d met two of the LR team previously and it was great to meet the other two - they’re an extremely fun group. I unfortunately didn’t do any blogging during the event, but here are a couple of comments/highlights/random facts from memory:

* Samba resulted from a grep of /usr/dict/words. This came as a result of a company sending a cease and desist over the previous smbserver name. That company later went out of business and admitted Samba was a much better name :)
* Miguel during a presentation that wasn’t going as planned - “Oh, I see - I F&*@’d up line 58″
* I should really have some custom LQ mod shirts made for the next time we exhibit.
* “I was actually feeling pretty good about Microsoft before OOXML” –JA
* “OOXML is *not* implementable by anyone other than Microsoft”
* Sun really doesn’t seem to want ZFS and Dtrace on other platforms - they see them as “differentiators”. (NOTE: I wish I remember who said this…but I don’t)
* Interesting point that was brought up. “One day CIO’s woke up and Linux was everywhere”. We all knew this, but it got me thinking. I’d guess a lot of the rapid success companies like RHT are seeing is due to the fact that CIO’s felt pressured to get support for this unknown influx of Linux. Now that they know and are addressing the issue, I assume much of the low hanging fruit, from a sales perspective, is starting to clear the queues. It’s unclear to me how this will impact growth in a couple years. We’ll have to see.
* The women in Open Source issue is an interesting one, and one I’ll need to think more about.
* Miguel and Jeremy should probably not share a mic.
* “What does Open Source mean when software is no longer deployed”
* Android looks really cool - I’ll almost certainly ditch the iPhone for this.

I hope the event comes back to the US next year and certainly plan to attend the event in the much ballyhoed Wolverhampton, UK. If you weren’t able to attend the event, the videos should be up soon (and are Creative Commons licensed). I’m in Santa Clara for the MySQL Expo now and hope to do a little better job about blogging that as it’s going on. The morning has already been interesting.

Cheers,
–jeremy

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Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit

Published by
jeremy
at April 10, 2008 in Linux, Linux Foundation and Open Source. 0 Comments

As I mentioned in the podcast, I had planned to attend the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit but had to cancel due to a last minute conflict. Since I wasn’t able to attend I’ve been keep a close eye on the coverage. It looks like I’m missing a great event. Here’s a couple links if you’re also interested in the event:

LF YouTube Channel
InformationWeek
Amanda McPherson on the VA announcement
SJVN live
Dave Jones
LWN

If you have a good link that I missed, feel free to post it in the comments.

–jeremy

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Lack of Linux support is … lacking

Published by
jeremy
at April 10, 2008 in Linux and Open Source. 0 Comments

Greg KH just released the Linux Driver Project Status Report as of April 2008. The executive summary:

The Linux Driver Project (LDP) is alive and well, with over 300 developers wanting to participate, many drivers already written and accepted into the Linux kernel tree, and many more being currently developed. The main problem is a lack of projects. It turns out that there really isn’t much hardware that Linux doesn’t already support. Almost all new hardware produced is coming with a Linux driver already written by the company, or by the community with help from the company.

There are two main classes of hardware, video input devices and wireless network cards, that is not well supported by Linux, but large efforts are already underway to resolve this issue, with the wireless driver issue pretty much taken care of already, however there are a few notable exceptions.

Because of this, our main effort has turned into one of education. Educating vendors of how to become members of the Linux kernel community, proper coding standards and procedures, and how to get their code into the kernel tree. Much of our recent effort has been in code cleanup and shepherding into the kernel.org releases.

In the future, we are open to any new devices that need drivers to be written for them, and our procedure for handling projects is going to be changing to reflect the lessons learned in the past year to make things easier for vendors to participate, and for the community to easily detect what is going on and be able to help out in easier ways.

The 451 Group has a nice summary:

But now comes word from Kroah-Hartman that there is actually a dearth of devices that are not supported by Linux. Similar to a recent kernel development study, news on the lack of hardware support issues comes with a status report on the Linux Driver Project. It now has driver code in the kernel and the interest of more than 300 Linux developers. But the real story is that, as Kroah-Hartman says, ‘It turns out that there really isn’t much hardware that Linux doesn’t already support.’ More importantly, he adds, ‘Almost all new hardware produced is coming with a Linux driver already written by the company, or by the community with help from the company.’

This says a lot about how far Linux has come, and it also tells us that the future for Linux looks bright because the open source OS is emerging as just another checklist item for OEMs, device makers, ISVs and others. Given the overwhelming support of hundreds of Linux developers and the underwhelming vendor response, Kroah-Hartman searched for the reason(s) that the great Linux support shortage appeared to be a myth. Having already pointed out that Linux supports more different devices than any other OS in the world, Kroah-Hartman reports he found that nobody seemed to know why this was ranked as a big concern for Linux. Fast forward to today, and we see the Linux Foundation no longer has driver support among its top things to be addressed.

I’d guess it ranked as such a big concern because the two main classes of hardware that aren’t well supported are both high profile and fairly annoying. These days, a computer in many contexts is useless without the Internet and much of that connectivity comes via wifi. While I’m not a gamer, many people are and current 3D video situation is still far from ideal. Those two issues aside though, I can’t remember the last time I plugged a device into a Linux machine without it “just working”. On the server side, many devices are supported in Linux before any other OS.

It’s great to see the project turn their attention to educating vendors, which should result not only in more driver but better drivers.

–jeremy

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Gratis 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo Conference Pass

Published by
jeremy
at March 11, 2008 in Linux, LinuxQuestions.org, MySQL and Open Source. 1 Comment

I recently mentioned that LQ will be sponsoring a number of upcoming Linux and Open Source related conferences. I’m extremely happy to report that we are now able to give away a completely free conference pass to some of them. The first one is the 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo, which is a $1,199.00 value. To be eligible, simply post in this thread explaining how you work with MySQL or how you’re involved in the MySQL community along with why you’d like to attend the event. We’ll randomly select a winner from the eligible entries. We only have a single pass to give away, so please make sure you are able to attend the event before entering. Thanks, and good luck.

Note: We also have some gratis LugRadio Live USA 2008 tickets available. See my previous post if you’re interested.

–jeremy

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Upcoming Events

Published by
jeremy
at March 6, 2008 in Linux, LinuxQuestions.org and Open Source. 2 Comments

LinuxQuestions.org is proud to sponsor a variety of Linux and Open Source related conferences and expos. The list of events coming up over the next couple months is significant, so I wanted to post about a few of them here.

OSBC

Attend OSBC March 25-26, 2008 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco and connect with the best and brightest in the open source community, engage with your peers in thought-provoking sessions and networking functions, and see the latest vendors on display in the open source showcase.

You can register here. I attended this event last year and it was an interesting one. If you’re in the area and doing commercial Open Source, I’d recommend it. I will be attending the event again this year.

MySQL Conference & Expo

Fast-paced sessions, guru-programming advice, in-depth tutorials, late night hacking…the MySQL Conference & Expo packs a wealth of big ideas, know-how, and connections into 4 concentrated days and nights. Learn how to create the best database applications, tools, and software through expert instruction and hands-on learning at the MySQL Conference & Expo, April 14-17, Santa Clara, CA. Use code mys08linq to save 15% off registration fees.

I attended this event last year and had a great time. With the recent acquisition of MySQL AB by Sun, I am really looking forward to attending this year.

LugRadio Live USA 2008

LugRadio Live USA 2008 brings San Francisco the unique atmosphere of LugRadio Live UK, an event that has developed a strong reputation for providing a range of topics about free software, Open Source, digital rights, technology and more, a compelling list of speakers, exhibitors and birds of a feather sessions, and wrapping it all in a unique, fun, loose, social and inclusive event, which is often described as combining the atmosphere of a rock concert and a computer conference.

LugRadio Live USA 2008 brings this unique atmosphere to the USA, with around 30 speakers, over 20 exhibitors, an eclectic range of BOF sessions, and plenty of additional sessions such as our debate discussion panel, a showcase of five minute talks, tech demos, and of course a live recording of LugRadio in front of an audience.

This will be the first LRL I have attended and I’m really looking forward to it. Would you like to attend LugRadio Live USA 2008? I’m happy to announce that I’m able to give away a couple of tickets gratis. The first three people to contact me, confirming that they’d like to attend, will get a free ticket.

–jeremy

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Sun and Open Source

Published by
jeremy
at February 26, 2008 in Linux, Linux Foundation, Open Source and Sun. 0 Comments

Sun takes a lot of heat in the community. Some would say too much, others would say not enough. I find the situation fascinating, really… and think it’s a good look into the complex and sometimes antithetical nature of the Open Source ecosystem. I don’t think it’s disputable the Sun has done a ton for Open Source. They have deep roots in OSS and to this day contribute a ton of code and mindshare. They have strayed off the path a bit at times and I think part of the uneasiness has to do with their waffling opinion on Linux. To me, it seems like much of this is in the past, but reputations die hard. One thing that is not in the past, and is the current cause of some consternation, is that Sun likes to control projects more then some in the Open Source world are willing to tolerate. The did it with Java, OOo and now OpenSolaris. Roy Fielding recently stepped down from the OpenSolaris project due to this and I think he brings up some valid concerns. I also think much of the problem Sun has in this regard isn’t how they act, but is around their messaging. As Roy mentioned in his email, companies like MySQL were able to adopt products that are truly Open Source with a decision making structure that was mostly controlled within the company. Not many people gave MySQL heat about that, because they were quite up front and transparent about it. Sun is not always so. My next point, as you may have guessed, is that with the recent MySQL AB acquisition, Sun has the opportunely to study and learn from the culture that MySQL was able to create. While I still have some concerns, the more I think about the deal the more I think it made a ton of sense for Sun.

While on the topic of Sun and Open Source, it would be hard to not mention the dust kicked up recently by this post. I do have some commentary, but will save it for a future post. I will say now that I do have some concerns that Sun will be tempted to push MySQL on Solaris, but I don’t think Linux support of MySQL will suffer any time soon. If you’d like some background on the Linux and OpenSolaris issue, this is a great post for you.

–jeremy

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Microsoft Makes Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability

Published by
jeremy
at February 26, 2008 in Linux, Microsoft, Open Formats, Open Source and Open Standards. 0 Comments

A little late on this, but better late than never. By now, you’ve probably heard about the Microsoft press release regarding “New interoperability principles and actions”:

Microsoft Corp. today announced a set of broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices to increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for developers, partners, customers and competitors.

Specifically, Microsoft is implementing four new interoperability principles and corresponding actions across its high-volume business products: (1) ensuring open connections; (2) promoting data portability; (3) enhancing support for industry standards; and (4) fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities.

“These steps represent an important step and significant change in how we share information about our products and technologies,” said Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer. “For the past 33 years, we have shared a lot of information with hundreds of thousands of partners around the world and helped build the industry, but today’s announcement represents a significant expansion toward even greater transparency. Our goal is to promote greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for customers and developers throughout the industry by making our products more open and by sharing even more information about our technologies.”

As you may have guessed, the blogosphere was abuzz with activity shortly after the announcement. First, let’s start with the basics. The products covered in this announcement are: Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007, and future versions of all these products. The key promises are: “Ensuring open connections to Microsoft’s high-volume products”, “Documenting how Microsoft supports industry standards and extensions”, “Enhancing Office 2007 to provide greater flexibility of document formats”, “Launching the Open Source Interoperability Initiative” and “Expanding industry outreach and dialogue”. While I see the word Open Source being used quite a bit in conjunction with this release, I see very little reason why. This is about API and protocol access for the most part. This will certainly help Open Source developers, but it isn’t Microsoft actually opening any code (or even changing their stance on Open Source from what I can tell).

Let me say that this could be the beginning of a fairly major shift for Microsoft, a change that most feel is long overdue. As usual though, the devil is in the details. Is this announcement fluff or substance? The first major hole I see is that the “covenant not to sue open source developers”, along with some other pieces, only pertain to “non-commercial” distribution/implementation. This makes room for a lot of gray area on how you define commercial use. Also, from what I can tell, the patent provision terms discussed in the announcement are not compatible with most Open Source licenses. That being said, it’s also a far cry from Microsoft calling Linux a cancer, so it’s certainly a step in the right direction. The real driver here, however, is almost certainly customer demand and a landscape that is shifting underneath the feet of Microsoft. I think the 451 group puts it well:

“Nudged by the European Union’s Court of First Instance, but more likely the result of a hard look at market dynamics and the competition, Microsoft has opened up its APIs and pledged to work more openly with the rest of the industry, including the open source community, on interoperability and standards issues. It’s an acknowledgment that in today’s world, many more flowers bloom when platform companies make their APIs completely open for developers to write to, a la Google and MSFT’s recent investee, Facebook. This is yet another thing Google has taught the largest software company in the world. It appears on the face of it that Microsoft now intends to live by the merit of its products, rather than rely on lock-in.

“As a result, developers should gain the potential to tie applications more closely into Microsoft’s Windows, SQL Server, Office and Exchange Server products with greater flexibility and innovation, perhaps through self-sustaining developer communities. SharePoint could also benefit from a platform approach, becoming a de facto central application for large segments of the market. And Microsoft is aiming to make open source applications run as well on Windows as they do on Linux, enabling it to continue competing against Linux while at the same time accepting and working to support open source projects.”

As it stands, whether this is a major announcement or a marketing fluff piece will become apparent in the coming months (and years). As real news comes forth, I’ll certainly be following it and will post updates. In the meantime, here is some additional reading:

Mary Jo Foley
Response from Red Hat
Groklaw
Bill Hilf
Andy Updegrove

One final note. I think one thing is absolutely clear. If this is to be the beginning of real change for MSFT, Ballmer has to go. I’ve said that before and I stand by it. It will not be possible for them to change with him in charge. Don’t think so? During all the talk of openness from Microsoft during this announcement, I leave you with his words from the press conference:

BRAD SMITH: With respect to other (commercial) distributors, and users, the clear message is that patent licenses will be freely available.

STEVE BALLMER: Patents will be, not freely, will be available.

BRAD SMITH: Readily available.

STEVE BALLMER: Readily available for the right fee.

–jeremy

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2007 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award Winners

Published by
jeremy
at February 21, 2008 in Linux, LinuxQuestions.org and Open Source. 0 Comments

The polls are closed and the results are in. You can view the detailed results here, but I’ll include a list of winners at the end of this post for convenience. This was the seventh annual LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards and we’ve set a record for participation each and every year. We had some extremely close races this year (in fact just .41% separated first and second in one case). We also had a couple of multi-year winners unseated this year. The biggest surprise for me was probably how well VirtualBox did, but that may just be a result of how much marketing is behind some of the other virtualization players. Recent Sun acquisitions MySQL and VirtualBox were both winners. Congratulations to all nominees. Winners should expect an email from me over the next couple days.

Desktop Distribution of the Year Ubuntu (30.83%)
Server Distribution of the Year Debian (30.30%)
Live Distribution of the Year KNOPPIX (22.88%)
Database of the Year MySQL (54.36%)
Office Suite of the Year OpenOffice.org (89.50%)
Browser of the Year Firefox (74.03%)
Desktop Environment of the Year KDE (52.08%)
Window Manager of the Year Compiz (33.65%)
Messaging App of the Year Pidgin (53.90%)
Mail Client of the Year Thunderbird (53.72%)
Virtualization Product of the Year VirtualBox (41.58%)
Audio Media Player Application of the Year Amarok (57.37%)
Audio Authoring Application of the Year Audacity (68.24%)
Video Media Player Application of the Year mplayer (41.78%)
Video Authoring Application of the Year mencoder (24.21%)
Multimedia Utility of the Year K3b (63.34%)
Graphics Application of the Year GIMP (69.15%)
Network Security Application of the Year nmap (24.95%)
Host Security Application of the Year SELinux (30.69%)
Monitoring Application of the Year Nagios (38.58%)
Windows on Linux App of the Year Wine (84.76%)
IDE/Web Development Editor of the Year Eclipse (22.29%)
Shell of the Year bash (87.33%)
Text Editor of the Year vi/vim (36.37%)
File Manager of the Year Konqueror (38.00%)
Open Source Game of the Year Battle for Wesnoth (21.74%)
Programming Language of the Year Python (21.78%)

–jeremy

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