New LQ Site is in Internal Beta

November 20, 2005 2 Comments

Been a long time coming, but the new LQ site is now in an internal sort of beta and the mods are having at at. What's this mean if you're an LQ member that has been waiting for the upgrade? We have set the tentative date for public release at December 3rd, which is less than 2 weeks away. The changes are significant and pretty much no part of the code remains unchanged. Despite that I think you'll find the LQ look and feel, which focuses on data and information – not being too flashy or fancy. I'll probably leave a few more breadcrumbs here and there and I'll give more upgrade info as the date draws closer. Stay tuned – I think you'll find it worth the wait.
–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

OSDL and the Linux Kernel Community

November 15, 2005 2 Comments

I mentioned in a previous post that I hoped Greg's comments on OSDL technical management were just an anomaly or simple miscommunication. Greg was kind enough to point out to me that this is unfortunately not the case. Currently they seem to be still ignoring us, as nothing has changed (yeah, lots of talk, but no real actions…) But, we have a slot on the board meeting in January to discuss our point-of-view, so we are not giving up yet. As I also mentioned in my last post, I'd hate to see OSDL drop the ball here. Their distribution agnostic employment of Linus, Andrew and others as well as some of the additional projects and initiatives they have going have become not only extremely important, but woven into the current framework. It's not like either Linus or Andrew would be hurting for a job if something happened to OSDL – companies would be waiting in line to be the ones that sign those checks. But, would that company offer the kind of vendor neutral, distro agnostic, non-commercial setup that they currently have? Who knows… but Linus has certainly shown that this is something that's important to him (and for good reason). FWIW, I'd be happy to help in whatever capacity I can. LQ was an OSDL Linux Summit sponsor last year and we're working on it for this year also, so I may be able to get somebodies ear from that angle. Additionally, I'd by happy to work with OSDL in any capacity that they think could help them with their “community building” skills. LQ has grown to over 200,000 members and 2,000,000 posts so I'd like to think I could help in some capacity. If anyone is interested, don't hesitate to contact me – even if it's just to chat or throw ideas around. This is sometimes that is important and worth working on to do correctly. Now, I'm sure there is plenty on both sides that I'm not aware of – but I'm more than willing to listen and learn.
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–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

Suse Linux Founder Exits Novell

November 10, 2005 1 Comment

Suse Linux founder, and kernel maintainer for more then a decade, Hubert Mantel has announced his resignation from Novell. “Too late for me. I just decided to leave Suse/Novell, this is no longer the company I founded 13 years ago.” were his parting words. Novell has a terrible history of wasted opportunity with technically superior products, but poor marketing. I held high hopes for them this time, but with this news along with the layoffs and other high profile departures, one has to wonder. I think the following comment is extremely telling: “I have been the maintainer of the Suse kernel for more than a decade now,” Mantel wrote. “I'm very confident the Novell management will find a competent successor very quickly. After all, there are lots of extremely skilled people over there in the Ximian division.” Clearly there is more to this story. Does it have to do with the recent KDE announcement? Does it have to do with a different internal struggle that was lost by the Suse division? Hard to tell at this point, but the recent grumblings I've heard about “being noising” gaining more ground within the company than “being correct” may have some basis. Please Novell, don't screw this up. Having two solid Enterprise distributions is critical. Companies learned a lesson with Microsoft, and they don't want to be beholden to a single company anymore. I'd guess we'll hear more details and see more fallout from this turn of events quite soon.
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–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

Should Linux Have a Binary Kernel Driver Layer?

November 8, 2005 Leave a comment

For those of you that follow LKML at all, you know this is a hotly debated topic. Greg K-H recently posted aboutan OSDL meeting on this topic, along with a follow up. This is a really interesting topic to me. Now, we all know that binary drivers are bad. Here's a post from a Microsoft employee with some details. Like most stories though, there are multiple sides with multiple views here. There are certainly some cases where a company releasing a 100% GPL driver is impossible, due to licensing, 3rd party agreements, whatever. I've even heard (warning, I've not taken the time to verify this) that in some cases it would be illegal to even release proper documentation on API's and interfaces, which would allow kernel maintainers to write a driver. In some other cases, a company may simply decide they don't want to release a Linux driver (be it company culture, company policy, FUD, to prevent tampering, a PHB's whim – whatever). The reality though is that the less driver support there is for Linux, the less mass adoption we'll get. I don't think that is arguable. BUT, the reason I like Linux and one of the reasons it has gotten as far as it has is because it values technical correctness, stability and performance over “adoption”. The question is, and I posted something else about this recently, what price are we willing to pay for mass adoption. It's a tough question and the answer certainly depends on what side of the coin you're on. I for one hope we continue to value technical correctness, speed and stability. For now, I think we will. As for the long run, well – I'm not sure.
On an unrelated note, I find Greg's comments on OSDL “technical management” a bit troubling. OSDL has become quite important to Linux and I'd hate to see them drop the ball. Let's hope this was just an anomaly or a genuine one time miscommunication (which certainly happen).
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–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

Microsoft: Open Source Not That Open

November 8, 2005 1 Comment

This article is about a presentation that was made at the OSBC. LQ was a show sponsor and I had hoped to attend, but that didn't work out. Jason Matusow, director of Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative, claimed that Open Source is really not all that open. He bases this on the following:
Red Hat issues patch updates for its premium offering, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and keeps customers' IT infrastructure secure.
“But if a customer modifies the source code, [Red Hat] can't help you [without charging you extra]. They have to lock things down to provide value,” Matusow said. “As open source becomes commercialized, it becomes less open.”
Sound reasonable right? No, not at all. He's missing multiple points and is trying to create FUD (or is misinformed). First, you can make all the changes you want and still get support from Red Hat – as long as you can prove you didn't cause the breakage. This just makes sense. Change some Firefox code and have a kernel problem? The kernel would be 100% supported by Red Hat. Change some kernel code and have a kernel problem? Obviously you'll need to recreate the problem with a stock kernel or diagnose the problem yourself. That's not less open, it's common sense. In fact, it's the way many many industries work (Change the tires on your car and have an engine problem, Ford will help you. Change the engines internals and have an engine problem, you're on your own). Beyond this though, he misses one of the main benefits of Open Source from a client perspective. You avoid vendor lockin! Don't like the kernel support you are getting from Red Hat? What if they discontinue support for a product you use? Go to Novell, IBM , Progeny or one of the other myriad support services that will be happy to help you. You can even hire a whizzbang kernel guy and do it in house. The choice is yours. Have that same problem in a closed shop and your options are 0. Once Microsoft abandons a product it is 100% unsupported…and worse it's 100% unsupportable! No code upgrades, no bug fixes, no security patches – ever.
One final thing that I found amusing was the following comment: We are building intellectual property into software and trying to sell it. We throw code over the wall for the community to build on it. Throw code over the wall?? Seems like an odd choice of words to me, almost condescending. And he said this in a room full of Open Source people, which means that statement made it past the PR people! Do you really want a vendor that not only talks that way, but thinks that way? The choice is yours.
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–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Microsoft, Open Source

Novell to Standardize on GNOME

November 5, 2005 1 Comment

With the acquisition of Ximian some time ago, you kind of had to see this coming. Novell will move future versions of SLES and NLD to Gnome. KDE will continue to be supported in OpenSuse. This will likely cause a lot of fallout from KDE users and traditional Suse users as Suse was one of the most popular KDE-centric distros (and in fact had a ton to do with KDE development in the past). This distinction now goes with Mandriva. It's interesting that KDE tends to be extremely popular in Europe. The reality however is that SLES and NLD users could probably care less for the most part. While we in the OSS world tend to love choice and tinkering with our desktop, enterprise users (and especially admins) tend to like uniformity and simplicity. While we tend to be vehement about some of our choices (KDE vs. Gnome, vi vs. emacs, etc), enterprise users usually don't even know what they are running (or know that there even is a choice). With RHEL standardizing on Gnome a while back, Novell acquiring a Gnome company and also having to cut costs – well, like I said…you probably saw this coming. The sad part is, the further these large companies get into the enterprise markets, the more of this we'll see. For this mainstream Linux adoption that everyone has been talking about to happen, consistency is a must. You think most OSX users know if they are running a Cocoa app or a Carbon one? This is going to be a tough pill to swallow. Luckily most projects will probably live on in a niche capacity for those of us that like choice, but some will probably unfortunately fold when the lack of corporate funding starts to kick in. For those of you who wanted corporate adoption, I hope you knew this was the price that was eventually going to have to be paid. When you shift from doing it for the love to doing it for the money, sometimes the rules change. It's not all bad though. In the end stability and ease of use should vastly improve, “porting to Linux” will begin to get easier as there are less platform choices and mainstream adoption will become a reality. Will the price have been worth it? We'll see.
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–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

Oracle to Offer Free Database

November 1, 2005 Leave a comment

Yup, you read that right, Oracle is going to offer a free database product. This is a gratis version and not a libre version, of course, but for Oracle even that is a huge step. Now, they have offered a free devel version for a long time…but this is a production version (although the limitations of 4GB disk and 1GB RAM are really low). This is surely a response to IBM and Microsoft doing something similar with DB2 and MSSQL Express. The database market is really starting to commoditize. The recent feature upgrades of MySQL with the release of 5.x coupled with Sun and some other large companies starting to really rally around PostgreSQL means that the commoditization is likely going to move one layer up in the DB market very soon. Oracle clearly doesn't like that. While I initially thought this free release might be based on InnoDB due to the recent acquisition, it's not. They're hoping to win mind share and also introduce Oracle to people who wouldn't normally be exposed to it, hoping one day those people will turn into decision makers. One thing that I found interesting was that, contrary to recent MySQL AB comments that the two vendors don't compete with each other, an Oracle spokesman specifically mentioned MySQL as a competitor that they'd like to target. I also found it interesting that the main reason given for the recent Innobase acquisition was “Oracle intends to extend a contract with MySQL where the InnoDB storage engine is packaged with MySQL”. No… that's not predatory. I'd watch out Monty.
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–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

On Educated Consumers

November 1, 2005 Leave a comment

Scoble points out 12 reasons that people may not go with Microsoft products. There, of course, are more – but on many accounts he hits the nail right on the head. So why is a Microsoft employee listing these things out? He wants educated consumers. That's something everyone should want. In the end, it really is best for everyone. Unfortunately, many reps (be it at Microsoft or at VAR's) do not feel this way. They want to make a sale regardless of what is best for the client. Let's face it – Microsoft is not always the best solution, but either is Linux. The right tool for the right job. Anything else and it's everyone but the sales guy who gets his commission that suffers. If everyone at Microsoft thought like Scoble, they'd clearly not have the reputation that they have. Unfortunately for everyone, that's not the case. The Scoble post was sparked by this post by Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield, whose post was sparked by this post by Steve Gillmor. You should read all three posts.
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–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Microsoft, Open Source

MySQL 5.0 Now Available for Production Use

October 24, 2005 Leave a comment

I've been talking a lot about MySQL recently, so I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that MySQL 5.0 is now the official GA release. Congrats the the whole MySQL AB team. You probably have a tough road ahead, but this is certainly something to be proud of and a moment to sit back and enjoy.
One thing I've never quite understood is the huge rivalry between some of the PostgreSQL and MySQL fans. I say some, because it's clearly a small but vocal minority on both sides. The PostgreSQL fans point out the MySQL is not a real database and data integrity is zero while the MySQL folks says…well – I'm sure you've heard the arguments. The fact is, they are both quality Open Source solutions that we should be proud of. We should be on the same team here. The fact is, PostgreSQL started at one end (hard to use, slower but ACID and more SQL compliant) and MySQL started at the other (easy to use, faster but not ACID). They've both made huge strides in each others direction and they are both now much closer to the middle (although still skewed slightly in their original directions). Because of their roots they tend to have much different supporters, but in reality I see many PostgreSQL people making comparisons when they've clearly not used MySQL since 3.23 and I see many MySQL people making comparisons when they've clearly not used PostgreSQL since about 6.5. Stop the bickering and use the right tool for the right job. I think you'll find that between PostgreSQL and MySQL you'll find that you have a solution for almost any occasion. In more cases then you might think these days, I think you may find that either DB will fit the bill. FWIW, LQ uses MySQL and it's not even 5.x. We've put off even looking at InnoDB until things settle down. Even if we had transactions, guess what – we wouldn't use them. Why? We don't need them. Does that mean we'd never switch? No! The right tool for the right job.
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–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

Microsoft, OSI Discuss Shared Source Licenses

October 24, 2005 Leave a comment

It seems that Microsoft is talking to the OSI about licensing. Now, I know that license proliferation is a very real problem, but I think Microsoft having a bona-fide OSI approved Open Source license that they are willing to consistantly use is probably a good thing. It would be ideal if they felt comfortable with one of the current ones, of course, but that may not be the case. Considering one of the main mantras of Open Source is that choice is good, I never understood the “GPL is the one true way” mentality. The Red Hat rep rails Microsoft for not using th GPL, but then goes on to say that out of 800 RHEL 4 source packages, only 400 are under the GPL. The OSI is still working on the proliferation issue, but surely “no new license under any circumstance” isn't a stance I can see them taking (for good reason). IMHO, if choice is good then the ability to choice from a variety of bona-fide Open Source licenses is good too. The obvious downside is that code licensed under one license can't be used in code licensed under another. That is a huge downside and one of the main reasons that proliferation is a problem at all. Like most things that are worth while though, this is a balancing act and is going to take some work to get right. Danese Cooper and Tim O'Reilly weigh in on the issue.
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–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Microsoft, Open Source

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