Where's my Gphone?

November 5, 2007 Leave a comment

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

Filed under Apple, Google, Linux, maemo, Nokia, Open Source, OpenMoko

How badly is CentOS hurting Red Hat?

November 5, 2007 1 Comment

That’s the question asked in this article:

Why does Red Hat tolerate CentOS? The Community ENTerprise Operating System is an identical binary clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (minus the trademarks), compiled from the source code RPMs that Red Hat conveniently provides on its FTP site. It is also completely free, as in beer. CentOS provides no paid support, but it does track Red Hat updates and patches closely, and usually makes them available within a few hours or at most a few days of the upstream provider, which it refers to for legal reasons as “a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor.” Free support for CentOS can be found in numerous places around the web, and a few third parties offer modestly priced paid support for those who want it.

It’s easy to understand what CentOS is. The question is, how much business is it really taking away from Red Hat? The answer: probably more than you think. For a hint about what’s going on, check out this amazing comparative chart on Google Trends.

I used to think most CentOS users were either just fooling around and not really running production servers, or else were using it in small IT shops populated by Linux geeks with a do-it-yourself culture. But a recent conversation with a friend set me straight. (I published part of this conversation here.) My friend runs the web site of a big city daily newspaper. Although it’s not in the same league as the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, it serves tens of millions of page views per month and pumps a big time advertising revenue stream into the coffers of the media conglomerate that owns it. The site is managed by a small in-house team and runs on several dozen dual and quad Intel servers with a classic LAMP stack that includes Apache, Perl, MySQL and of course Linux.

Until fairly recently they ran this web site on an old version of Red Hat with essentially no outside support. But they found that the up-to-date versions of the applications in their stack didn’t run so well on Red Hat 7.3, so they decided they needed to upgrade to something more recent. Naturally the first thing they looked at was RHEL 4 (this started a while back), and then RHEL 5. But they freaked out when they saw Red Hat’s prices. $1,299 per year for 24×7 support on the two socket version of RHEL 5, or $2,499 for the unlimited socket version. True, if you cut back to 12×5 support those prices come down, dropping to $799 and $1499 respectively. But even if they run RHEL on a mix of two and four socket machines, they’re still looking at $50K per year minimum for the privilege of sticking the little red logo on their servers.
Bottom line? They decided to go with CentOS 5, which they are now rolling out to their production servers.

So, is CentOS hurting Red Hat? I don’t think so, in fact I’d say it’s actually helping Red Hat. You see, the company mentioned didn’t balk on Red Hat because of anything but price. That means if they didn’t move over to CentOS, they would have moved to Debian, or Ubuntu, or Suse… or insert some gratis distro or direct Red Hat competitor here. Now, with a CentOS base let’s say the company grows or needs to run an app that is only supported on RHEL/SLES. What distro do you think they are likely to pay for in that scenario.

It goes further than that, though. Many members of the CentOS community are also valued members of the Fedora community. Red Hat gets Open Source at a very fundamental level and sees the benefit of this. Also, with no free version of their enterprise product, CentOS serves as a way to get broader exposure and therefore enables additional gratis testing for many RHEL bits. In the end I see CentOS and RHEL as more complimentary then competitive. I know it doesn’t appear that way at first glance, but when you really look at the market each is serving, it becomes a little more clear.

–jeremy

Filed under Fedora, Linux, Open Source, Red Hat

Some LinuxQuestions.org Stats

November 1, 2007 Leave a comment

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

Filed under Adobe, Apple, Firefox, Google, Linux, LinuxQuestions.org, Microsoft, Sun

An open letter to Steve Ballmer from Mandriva

November 1, 2007 1 Comment

The CEO of Mandriva just posted an open letter to Steve Ballmer:

I’m sure we’re way too small for you to know me. You know, we’re one of these tiny Linux company working hard for our place on the market. We produce a Linux Distro, Mandriva Linux. The last edition, Mandriva 2008 was seen as a pretty good version and we’re proud of it. You should give it a spin, I’m sure you’d like it. We also happen to be one of the Linux companies that did not sign an agreement with your company (nobody’s perfect).

We recently closed a deal with the Nigerian Government. Maybe you heard about it, Steve. They were looking for an affordable hardware+software solution for their schools. The initial batch was 17,000 machines. We had a good answer to their need: the Classmate PC from Intel, with a customized Mandriva Linux solution. We presented the solution to the local government, they liked the machine, they liked our system, they liked what we offered them, the fact that it was open, that we could customize it for their country and so on.

Then your people entered the game and the deal got more competitive. I would not say it got dirty, but someone could have said that. They fought and fought the deal, but still the customer was happy to get CMPC and Mandriva.

So we closed the deal, we got the order, we qualified the software, we got the machine shipped. In other word, we did our job. I understand the machine are being delivered right now.

And then, today, we hear from the customer a totally different story: “we shall pay for the Mandriva Software as agreed, but we shall replace it by Windows afterward.”

How is it, you wonder, that a country like Nigeria has the money to not only buy the Mandriva+Classmate solution but also then throw Mandriva away and pay for all those Windows licenses? The answer, I’m sure, is that they don’t. Microsoft is probably marking the license cost to near $0 and may even be tossing in some kicker money (speculation on my part). The thing is, Microsoft has the money to do these kinds of things… and will for some time. Is that really fair competition though? I’d say no, but I’d say it’s also an admission that they can’t win with their old way of doing things. That has to be scary realization for a company that is so used to winning. Kudos to Mandriva for keeping up the fight and for winning deals like this one. I’d guess we won’t be seeing them sign one of the patent covenant deals any time soon.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Mandriva, Microsoft, Open Source

Linux Losing Market Share to Windows Server II

October 29, 2007 Leave a comment

As a quick follow up to this post, it seems that Dell is not seeing the same trend. From the article:

Dell CEO: Linux server sales increasing

Claims made by Microsoft that Linux violates its software patent have not affected sales of Linux-based hardware, according to Dell’s CEO Michael Dell.

Speaking at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Dell said his company has seen Linux uptake for servers increase faster than Windows server products, despite Microsoft’s claims.

He said: “On the server side Linux continues to grow nicely, a bit faster than Windows. We’re seeing a move to Linux in critical applications, and Linux migration has not slowed down.”

Just another data point to keep in mind, like I said this stat is particularly hard to track with any real accuracy. While on the topic of Dell and Linux, it looks like Ubuntu desktop sales are tracking as expected. From a recent interview:

Can you give me an idea of what embracing Linux/Ubuntu for the home desktop and laptop has done for Dell? What has changed, what has stayed the same?

Embracing Ubuntu Linux on our desktops and laptops seems to have really raised Dell’s visibility within the Linux community. We have been supporting, testing, developing for, and selling Linux for 8+ years here at Dell, but before the Ubuntu announcement, a lot of people didn’t know that we did any of that. The announcement certainly opened people’s eyes, and there seems to be much more awareness now that Dell is serious about supporting Linux.

What has not changed is our overarching philosophy and trying to make Linux “just work” on all of Dell’s systems. Through our work with Linux on our servers and workstations, our goal has always been to push all device driver support and bug fixes into the respective upstream projects and to our Linux vendors. Our goal is to have customers be able to choose their Linux distro of choice, install it on whatever Dell system they buy, and have the OS install and run flawlessly. While this is very hard to accomplish, we have had a lot of success over the years doing this, and was an easy model to extend into the other Dell product lines for Linux.

Previous to our Ubuntu product announcement, it was much more difficult to extend this model to consumer desktop and laptop technologies. We would have a conversations with vendors about pushing Linux support for their hardware, but without a Linux product offering from Dell for that hardware, it was very difficult to convince them to release Linux drivers. That has certainly changed now that we offer Ubuntu Linux, and we are making much more progress in our vendor discussions.

Another area that has changed is our thinking around OS support models. Traditionally for enterprise Linux customers, if we sell them an OS on their system, they expect and demand a high level of operating system support. That is certainly not the case for our Ubuntu Linux customers, who have stated very loudly that, for the most part, they do not want to pay for OS support, and would rather get support from the community. That is a much different support model from what we have traditionally used, but is certainly one that we have embraced.

The original sales estimates for Ubuntu computers was around 1% of the total sales, or about 20,000 systems annually. Have the expectations been met so far? Will Dell ever release sales figures for Ubuntu systems?

The program so far is meeting expectations. Customers are certainly showing their interest and buying systems preloaded with Ubuntu, but it certainly won’t overtake Microsoft Windows anytime soon. Dell has a policy not to release sales numbers, so I don’t expect us to make Ubuntu sales figures available publicly.

A couple interesting tidbits in there. It’s absolutely great to see Dell pushing for more native vendor Linux drivers. They ship the kind of number needed to get vendors to listen. Kudos.

–jeremy

Filed under Dell, Linux, Microsoft, Ubuntu

Linux Losing Market Share to Windows Server

October 26, 2007 2 Comments

That’s the title of this eWeek article:

Linux growth in the U.S. x86 server market has, over the past six quarters, started to falter and reverse its positive course relative to Windows Server and the market as a whole.

The annual rate at which Linux is growing in the x86 server space has fallen from around 53 percent in 2003, when Windows Server growth was in the mid-20 percent range, to a negative 4 percent growth in calendar year 2006, IDC Quarterly Server Tracker figures show.

Over the same time period, Windows has continued to report positive annual growth, outpacing the total growth rate in the x86 market by more than 4 percent in 2006, indicating that Linux has actually lost market share to Windows Server over this time.

The same holds true for worldwide Linux x86 server shipments, which dropped from the huge annual growth rate of about 45 percent is 2003 to growth of less than 10 percent in 2006, the IDC figures show.

One of the biggest reasons for this is that the migrations from Unix to Linux have slowed down markedly.

“We have seen the rate of migration from Unix slow over the past few quarters,” IDC analyst Matt Eastwood told eWEEK. “In my view this is because much of the low-hanging fruit has been moved and the applications that remain on Unix are stickier because they are seen as business critical and more political candidates for migration overall.”

The truth is, most of the low-hanging fruit probably has been picked off. That’s not a bad thing, it’s simply part of the natural maturation process that Linux is inevitably going to go through. Historically, a large number of Linux migrations were from UNIX and NetWare. At some point, that was going to have to change. At some point, Linux was going to have to more directly compete with Windows on the server. Everyone knew that – why do you think Microsoft has been fighting so hard on the marketing side of things? It’s clear that time is coming soon… very soon. It’s not going to be easy, of course, but I think Linux is now very well positioned. It should also be noted that Linux is notoriously hard to track when it comes to these kinds of analysts reports. Many distributions that are being used in the data center now, such as Ubuntu, are not commercial products. Often times Linux is deployed on hardware that is being reused. There are a myriad reasons why the Linux number is extremely unreliable. I say let’s use that to our advantage. Let this be a wake up call for us and a reason for them to think they can sit back and rest on their laurels.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Microsoft

Devices Lacking Linux Support Needed

October 26, 2007 Leave a comment

Greg KH recently announced that Novell was letting him work on the Linux Driver Project full time. The response was huge, with over 300 developers answering the call. Lack of Linux drivers is usually pretty high up on the list of Linux shortcomings. But a follow up post by Greg indicates that there’s not enough work to keep all the developers busy:

There was a lot of very good press coverage over my last announcement of the restart of the Linux Driver Project and my involvement in it now full time. It’s been a few weeks since that announcement, and we now have over 300 different developers signed up to help create, and maintain Linux drivers!

I’ve also posted a short status report about the current projects, and what is going on with them. Since then, one more project has started, and there are a handful still in the planning stage.

What we need now is more companies participating in the project, we have the developers, but not enough work to keep them busy.

So how do we change this? I’m thinking that possibly, there really isn’t a large number of different devices out there that need Linux support written for them.

As proof of this, I give you the Linux Foundation’s Vendor Advisory Board. This group of companies publish a list of priorities that they feel need to be worked on in order to help Linux succeed.

Coming in at number 3 is “Device Driver Support”. So, I approached this group and asked them specifically what devices did they see in common use that are not supported by Linux (the obvious 2 video cards being a known exception.) Despite this being such a high priority for this group, they had no examples to provide.

And neither do I. I don’t currently know of any common piece of hardware in use today that is not supported on Linux. And since these vendors do not know, and I don’t, I’m asking the world to help out.

So, please, let me know what specific type of device you know of that is not properly supported on Linux. If you want, please mark up the wiki page at:

http://linuxdriverproject.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/DriversNeeded

Is the lack of Linux device drivers an issue that is a bit overblown by a couple of high profile examples? Is it a stigma held over from previous days when some areas, such as wireless networking, were poor? Visit the Linux Driver Project wiki if you have hardware that doesn’t work in Linux, and let them know.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Novell, Open Source

Asian Linux Distributor Strikes Patent Covenant with Microsoft

October 25, 2007 Leave a comment

Looks like Microsoft struck another patent deal with a Linux distribution, this time it’s Turbolinux. From the article:

In a deal that could lead to the creation of a unique cross-platform authentication system for heterogenous networks, Tokyo-based Linux distributor Turbolinux announced this morning, Japan time, it has reached an agreement with Microsoft for a cross-licensing of the two companies’ patent portfolios.

On the surface, what Turbolinux gets out of this is the interoperability information it needs to develop a single-sign-on service, enabling users to authenticate themselves once and transfer that security authority between operating systems. That’s how Microsoft is playing up the deal today, as it announces it will establish a permanent workshop at its Beijing office “to focus on testing and showcasing solutions for customers and partners,” as last night’s announcement put it.

But Turbolinux could have gotten that information through a simple, one-way license agreement. By making the deal two-way, Microsoft opens up the possibility for a kind of front-end portal: a way to make Windows the logon prompt for Linux.

While Turbolinux CEO Yano Koichi characterized the deal as a way to help his customers perceive Turbolinux as “the distribution that works best with their existing Microsoft investments,” it’s perhaps impossible not to consider the implications of Microsoft being able to leverage its joint discoveries – to which it would presumably be fully licensed – in devising a similar portal for Linspire and Novell distributions, and perhaps others.

Not too interesting overall, but you can see two trends here. The distros that Microsoft is able to entice with these patent deals are becoming smaller and smaller. Second, each progressive deal is getting less and less coverage. This deal happened days ago and I just heard about it now. The fact that Turbolinux is not huge in the US may have something to do with it, but I’d say it’s part of a larger trend.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Microsoft

Microsoft and the EU anti-trust battle

October 25, 2007 Leave a comment

Earlier this week, Microsoft agreed with the EU Commission’s 2004 ruling that it was abusing its dominance in the market in the workgroup server market and would not appeal against a further EU court ruling, which upheld the Commission’s initial findings. Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for competition policy, called this “a victory for the consumer”, but noted her concern about how long it took for Microsoft to comply. Initial reactions in the blogosphere seemed to indicate that this “capitulation” was a win for Open Source. It appears this reaction may have been a little premature. From the article:

Perhaps I was a little quick to congratulate Neelie Kroes on a job well done forcing Microsoft to extend its interoperability protocols to open source software vendors and developers. It now appears that the terms of the agreement mean that it is incompatible with the GPL.

“I told Microsoft that it had to make interoperability information available to open source developers. Microsoft will now do so, with licensing terms that allow every recipient of the resulting software to copy, modify and redistribute it in accordance with the open source business model,” noted Kroes.

Glynn Moody points to the FAQ, which tells a different story, however:

“Can open source software developers implement patented interoperability information?
Open source software developers use various “open source” licences to distribute their software. Some of these licences are incompatible with the patent licence offered by Microsoft. It is up to the commercial open source distributors to ensure that their software products do not infringe upon Microsoft’s patents. If they consider that one or more of Microsoft’s patents would apply to their software product, they can either design around these patents, challenge their validity or take a patent licence from Microsoft.”

As Moody notes: the incompatible licenses include “the GNU GPL, as used by Samba, the only program that really cares about Microsoft’s damn protocols? And let’s not forget that this “patented interoperability information” isn’t even valid in Europe, because you can’t patent software or business methods or whatever you want to call this stuff. And yet the EU has just passed a quick benedictus on the whole bloody thing.”

Indeed, hardly seems like any kind of victory at all. This is no real remedy for the years of abuse, and the spectre of software patents still looms its ugly head. Mark Webbink puts it well:

“I, for one, just wish the Commission had gone a bit easier on the open source rhetoric. It is misleading from the standpoint that the settlement does not resolve all or even the biggest issues that open source will have with implementing these protocols.”

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Microsoft, Open Source

SCO still hanging on

October 25, 2007 Leave a comment

After filing for Chapter 11, SCO may have found a buyer for its UNIX operations. From the article:

While still fighting in the courts and fresh from filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last month, The SCO Group could soon be selling its steadily-declining Unix business.

In a filing in US Bankruptcy Court in Delaware, the Lindon, Utah-based company said it had received a “potential” $US36 million offer for its Unix business from JGD Management, an umbrella business of New York-based investment firm, York Capital Management. The filing has been posted on the Groklaw.com website, which has been tracking the legal records of the ongoing lawsuits between SCO, IBM, Novell and others. In it, SCO reports that the offer includes money for its Unix business, litigation claims and for litigation expenses.

The bid is subject to approval by the bankruptcy court, according to the filing, and competitive bids could still be accepted from other potential buyers.

SCO filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization last month as it began seeking ways to stay in business amid mounting expenses and several legal rulings that have hurt its legal fights with IBM and Novell.

If SCO gets out of the Unix business, it would continue solely as a mobile application platform vendor, which it has been working to become over the last several years.

York is a large hedge fund-like capital management company, so at first I didn’t think there was anything odd about this. It was probably an LBO in which the company thought it could squeeze some value out of a product that had been neglicted. Fairly popular stuff these days. But, it gets odd from here. As noted on Groklaw:

JGD Management Corporation has its principal executive offices at 1118 East Green Street Pasadena, California 91106 (http://www.secinfo.com/d12TC3.v51a.htm)

If you google the address the first match is a reference to a page on Edgar which provides the Form 4 (any of you US business types know what that is?) for a company known as Arrowhead Research Corp which has one R Bruce Stewart as its
CEO and Chairman of the Board.
(http://edgar.brand.edgar-online.com/EFX_dll/EDGARpro.dll?FetchFilingHTML1?SessionID=T-hII2bI2EHwHrP&ID=3669175)

R Bruce Stewart founded Acacia Research Corporation in March 1991.
(http://www.forbes.com/finance/mktguideapps/personinfo/FromPersonIdPersonTearsheet.jhtml?passedPersonId=927443).

Yes, that would be the same Acacia that is currently suing Red Hat and Novell. Quite some coincidence. I haven’t had a chance to personally verify all the information from the Groklaw post, but the links are all there for you to do so. If you’d like to do some additional research:

http://www.secinfo.com/d14D5a.u4d4r.htm
http://sec.edgar-online.com/2004/05/17/0001015402-04-002107/Section7.asp

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Open Source, SCO

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