Open Source > Linux > LQ
April 28, 2005 Leave a comment
I mentioned this a while back, but that post focused more on acquisitions. The trend is continuing and VC is now coming back to the Open Source space. JBOSS recently got $10 Million and the articles reports that almost $150 Million was raised by Open Source companies in 2004. Luckily, the funding seems to be a little more rational then it was during the bubble. Hopefully it will stay that way.
–jeremy
April 26, 2005 Leave a comment
A little overdue, but LQ Radio is finally getting off the ground. The first LQ Radio show should be available next month and the first LQ Radio interview has been posted. The interview features Tom Adelstein and Sam Hiser. We cover a variety of topics and I think the end result is fantastic content wise. Skype gave us a huge amount of problems and we ended up ditching the p2p bit and I called both Sam and Tom via Skypeout. Let me know what you think.
–jeremy
April 25, 2005 Leave a comment
It's unfortunate to see both the Open Source community and a small town taken advantage of like this. Kudos to Robin 'roblimo', both for taking the time to do the reporting for that article and for having the patience and fortitude to be able to have a discussion that long with some one who is clearly lying and pandering. It's a reminder that just because someone uses the words “Open Source“, it doesn't make them right or necessarily good intentioned. This guy is most certainly not OSI approved.
–jeremy
April 22, 2005 Leave a comment
For any of you who may be in the area, I'll be presenting at the next Buffalo Professional Linux Users Group meeting. The main topic I'll be covering is MySQL. If you'll be in or around Buffalo next Thursday, make sure to stop by the meeting.
–jeremy
April 20, 2005 Leave a comment
The second Keynote of the day was from HP Canada CEO Paul Tsaparis. A large part of the keynote was a “Power of Linux” video, which was basically a testimonial from Dreamworks. The video has some interesting bits, but was a little too pro vendor IMHO. The video explained that over 50% of Shrek 2 was rendered remotely “On Demand” (it was all rendered on Linux). This “On Demand” system allowed them to hit rendering peaks and make the deadline for the movie while only actually having to purchase enough infrastructure to do the average amount of computing. This is the direction that a lot of computationally intensive apps seem to be going, and I know that IBM has a similar service. While this is obviously only something that a couple niche industries would use, it is very slick. The best quote from the movie was from a Dreamworks employee (the CTO if I recall correctly), which said point blank “We are interested in Linux”. He then went on to say that Dreamworks went with HP because they understood Linux. Hopefully other companies will listen to statements like this one. While it wasn't disclosed in the video, I'd say the dollar amount for the products and services purchased for Shrek 2 were substantial.
The presentation also explained that HP deploys Linux internally. They don't do so to “eat their own dog food” as some companies claim, but they do if for the same reasons they recommend it to their clients. They have over 13,000 internal devices with Linux installed, their Linux email cluster (15 machines) processes over 3TB of email a year, their entire DNS infrastructure (160 servers) runs Linux, they use Jabber for internal secure IM and much of their wifi network is Linux based.
–jeremy
April 20, 2005 Leave a comment
While I was a tad late to this session by maddog, entitled “Free and Open Source Software: Back to the Future”, the part I did catch was very good. His first point was that, until the early 80's the only way you ever got software was with the source (even though it wasn't necessarily called “Open Source” at that time). Back then software was often owned by the purchasing entity on contract, instead of licenses like it is today. He went on to cover why software patents are evil and how they really stifle innovation. He made the point that in most cases, patents come after software has already been written and are the work of lawyers – not programmers. He explained that since large companies are able to build large stockpiles of patents, they are able to negotiate with each other and avoid problems…while the little nimble companies with no or few patents end up being the losers in the current system. He went as far as to say that given the choice between the Devil, George W. Bush and Patents that he'd pick the Devil. He also wondered why software (an art form in his opinion) has patents but neither music or painting does. He asked, “what if Beethoven had to redo the 9th symphony due to patent infringement” or “what if Michelangelo had to repaint the Sistine Chapel because someone claimed they had patented a brush stroke he had used”.
Finally, he covered some proprietary myths and some advantages of OSS. One example he used was that, Microsoft once touted to him that one of their products supported almost 50 languages. After congratulating them, he explained that, with OSS since anyone who finds a native language missing from a product can contribute to the project, it lead to the first ever word processor supporting Swahili…or all 18 official languages of India plus many of the local tribal dialects, plus – well, you get the idea. Overall a very good session – thanks maddog!
–jeremy
April 19, 2005 Leave a comment
I'm back from day 1 of LinuxWorld Canada. The show definitely has a different feel that the other LinuxWorlds, mostly as a result of the expo floor being shared between LinuxWorld and NetworkWorld. The conference is more “suit” than even the East coast US show and vendors such as Cisco are present, which is not something you'd see normally. The expo is similar in size to LWE UK, which is to say a bit smaller than the US counterparts. Most of the vendors I talked to said that while the show was smaller and therefore had less attendees, the people who did attend where highly qualified. What this means coming from a vendor is that there were a large number of decision makers present – Government attendees seemed to be particularly numerous. As always I had some great disccusions and it's always good to be able to sit down face to face and talk. Just by chance when I sat down to grab a bite to eat I ended up next to Brian Proffitt and had a next chat with him. Seems I may end up a judge at one of the future LinuxWorlds. Next, I'll give my take on some of the sessions I attended. Stay tuned.
–jeremy
April 17, 2005 Leave a comment
Just a reminder that LinuxWorld Canada, which is being held in Toronto, will run from April 19th-20th. I'll be making the trip, so if you'd like to meet up for any reason, drop me a line. Remember, since LQ is a show sponsor, I am able to offer you a free pass.
–jeremy
April 16, 2005 3 Comments
This seems to be getting uglier and uglier. I've still not had the amount of time needed to properly sort out all the info here, but I'm a bit surprised the fallout has been this bad. There is a real danger of the community becoming fractured and polarized here…we need to avoid that. Tridge did what he does (and is damn good at) and it's hard to believe that his intentions were bad or that he was doing something with malice. At the same time, Linus has always been of the opinion that commercial products, even closed source ones, are not inherently evil and that using them, if they are clearly the best, is fine. This annoyed a lot of people, but at the end of the day Linux is still Linus project whether you agree with him or not. You can read more about how Linus feel on the subject, which he calls the real difference between “Open Source” and “Free Software” here. At any rate, what's done is done and we need to get this sorted and put behind us. Linus is writing git for SCM and both sides are clearly a bit agitated here. I for one will continue to watch this *extremely* closely as the impact could be so far reaching.
–jeremy
April 16, 2005 1 Comment
Looks like Munich has selected a Distro for its Linux migration. While it was Suse, along with IBM, that did the original year-long pilot, the city choose to go with Debian for the final rollout. One has to wonder if Suse would have been selected if it was still an independent Germany company, and not a division of US based Novell. The Debian distro will be customized for this job and they hope to begin the migration by the end of the year. This is one of the largest government Linux migrations ever and its outcome could have a huge impact on future uptake of Linux in government, so this is definitely something to keep a close eye on. It's so important in fact that it was reported that when the original decision was made, MSFT CEO Steve Ballmer cut short a ski vacation in Switzerland to travel to Munich to speak with the mayor. Clearly, whatever he said wasn't able to sway the decision.
–jeremy
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