CheckPoint Acquires Sourcefire

October 11, 2005 Leave a comment

The money sure was flowing while I was in the UK, wasn't it? By acquiring Sourcefire, CheckPoint gets the Open Source Snort IDS along with Marty Roesch and a ton of other expertise. In a letter from Marty, he states: “I’ll start by stating again what I’ve stated in the past, Snort is now and will continue to be free to end-users.”. What definition of free that is remains to be seen, but I've dealt with CheckPoint long enough to know their sole motivation is money. Marty has been a really stand up guy and Sourcefire has been a model company in the Open Source world, IMHO. They made money, but still usually did the right thing. I hope this trend continues while under the thumb of CP, but I have my doubts. If nothing else, Open Source in the business world is certainly being legitimized. Should be an interesting OSBC next month (which , incidentally, LQ is a sponsor of).
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–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

Oracle Acquires Innobase OY

October 10, 2005 Leave a comment

Oracle recently announced that is has acquired Innobase. For those who have never heard of Innobase, they are lead by Heikki Tuuri and develop InnoDB. InnoDB brings transactions, row-level locking, foreign keys and other ACID features to MySQL. Who uses InnoDB? Sites like Yahoo! finance, Wikipedia and Google among many many others. LQ has been looking into it quite seriously lately too (the one thing holding us back was the lack of FULLTEXT support, but we can work around that). Until now, InnoDB and MySQL were fairly tightly coupled. You have to think this will soon change and there will likely be at least one additional front end for InnoDB released by Oracle at some point. Beyond that, Oracle is clearly not going to be as receptive to MySQL AB as Heikki was. Despite their public comment, MySQL can't be too happy about this one. They are now beholden to Oracle to supply their only transactional backend. That's not a good position to be in. I have no idea why MySQL didn't acquire Innobase a long time ago, but I'm sure there's a story there. The Oracle press release does state that “InnoDB is not a standalone database product: it is distributed as a part of the MySQL database. InnoDB's contractual relationship with MySQL comes up for renewal next year. Oracle fully expects to negotiate an extension of that relationship.” At a minimum, I'd guess the terms won't be as good for MySQL AB as the current ones. You have to wonder what the Oracle play is here. Will they release an “OSS” or “community” Oracle with InnoDB as the backend? Did they do this to crush a competitor, as with the Peoplesoft and J.D. Edwards acquisitions? Or is there more to it? This could be a move to attempt to hurt SAP, which recently aligned itself quite closely with MySQL AB with the MaxDB release. SAP is really one of the only main competitors Oracle has left in some spaces. I have to admit I'm a bit skeptical on this one and I hope MySQL AB comes out alright, as I really like the product and the company. Sure, InnoDB is GPL – but that just gets you the current code. With something this complicated, you still need the expertise to continue to develop that code and much of that will surely be locked up at Oracle now. You have to assume this acquisition had something to do with the recent “MySQL wants to be Ikea of the database market” comment from Marten Mickos. If anyone has any more information on this one, be it on or off the record, I'd love to hear about it.
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–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

Money Coming into the Blogosphere

October 9, 2005 Leave a comment

A ton of news came out while I was away, and I'll be slowly catching up here over the next couple of days. One bit of news that has seemed more and more likely recently, is that some major money from some huge companies is coming into the blogosphere. You had to see this coming. The least surprising of the two deals is that Weblogsinc was sold. AOL is a content network and Weblogsinc has content. $25 Million seems like a bit much to me, but what do I know. I'd expect Blog Networks to spring up from every direction now. The more surprising of the two deals is that Dave Winer sold Weblogs.com. In itself, that's not too surprising as he has mentioned that the site was becoming a bit too much for him to handle alone. At first I was surprised though, that the acquiring company was Verisign. That's the exact kind of company that Dave usually hammers on. Look at some of the things they've done in the recent past (Sitefinder anyone?) and you know they don't “get it”. But, after reading Dave's explanation that they are an “infrastructure” company I can see some logic to it. Let's hope they treat it differently then some of their other holdings, although I see no reason why they would. You can read what Verisign has to say about the deal here. At any rate, Dave has done a ton for blogging (among other things) and certainly deserves some remuneration for his efforts. You can just see Bubble2.0 starting to lift, can't you?
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–jeremy

Filed under Main Page

LinuxWorld UK Wrapup

October 8, 2005 Leave a comment

With LinuxWorld come and gone, here's a quick wrapup. London was once again a great time. While I was extremely late the first day, I still had a full day to explore the city. Between this year and last year I got to see a fair bit of the city, and I must say I quite like it. One thing I did find odd was how early most things close, but this year we were able to find the spots you need to go to avoid that. Both David and Chris stayed in the same hotel as me, which I think worked out well. Ray and Peter both made the trek from outside of London each morning.
The .Org Village this year was much better than last year as far as the layout goes. While last year we had to stand in the aisle, this year we had a proper booth. As usual the .Org was busy. Overall, the show definitely has a much different feel than either of the US ones (although, to be honest those have a much different feel from each other). The one thing lacking this year was any kind of usable wifi, though that's not for lack of trying. As usual we got to meet some current LQ members and also meet some people who never heard of the site. Both are fun IMHO. We ended up getting a ton of feedback. Once again the pub ended up also being a great place for feedback. Any time a bunch of mods get together in person and start chatting I always learn a lot – both on the LQ topic (some brilliant ideas spawned in the pubs of London will certainly eventually make it into the LQ code) and just in general. A huge thanks goes out to all the mods who were able to attend. I have every intention of making LWE UK a yearly trip, as long as UKLinux and IDG make the generous offer.
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–jeremy

Filed under Linux, LinuxWorld, Main Page, Open Source

Returned from LinuxWorld

October 8, 2005 Leave a comment

Back in NY from London and as you probably noticed the blog wasn't uploaded once. Unfortunately, the wifi in London was either extremely poor (at LWE) or fairly expensive (about $11/hour at the hotel). When you couple that with how busy things were, the blog just didn't get updated. The next couple posts will be LWE UK updates though, so all is not lost. I'll start things off in this post with a link to the Flick LWE UK 05 photo album. Once again the show and London were fantastic. More to come later today.
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–jeremy

Filed under Linux, LinuxWorld, Main Page, Open Source

London Bound

October 2, 2005 Leave a comment

My plane leaves in a couple hours, so it's time to start packing. Remember, if you'll be anywhere near London on October 5-6, make sure to stop into LWE UK in Olympia2. I'll be stationed in the LQ booth, which is located in the .ORG village. It's always great to meet LQ members and I'll be joined by at least 4 LQ mods. I'll be sure to update my blog from the expo.
–jeremy
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Massachusetts Finalizes Plan to Use the OpenDocument Standard II

September 27, 2005 Leave a comment

A follow up to this post. I was more then a bit perturbed when I read this “open letter”, from Alan Yates. It seems some people within Microsoft just aren't ready to compete fairly. He is brazen enough to bring up words like due process and acts as if Microsoft is the only one looking out for the good of the people. He insinuates somehow that Microsoft software is standard and that anything else is odd, non-standard and unprecedented. He claims that the OpenDocument format is “untested in the marketplace” while ignoring that the Microsoft XML format hasn't even been released yet. He flat out lies and says that all the office suites that support OpenDocument are derived from the same codebase. 30 seconds of due diligence would have cleared that up, but the response from KDE is here. He also insinuates that Microsoft is the only one that could possibly innovate and even brings into question the government procurement process, which has heavily favored Microsoft in almost every case I've seen. He somehow misses the fact that only Microsoft can officially support their current format and the future format is patent encumbered. He also leaves out that Microsoft is more than welcome to both join OASIS and implement the OpenDocument format into MS Office. I don't have time to tear this piece down line by line, but luckily some others have. The amount of shear FUD in this is astounding though and it'll be interesting to see how MA responds.
–jeremy
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Filed under Main Page, Microsoft, Open Source

Massachusetts Finalizes Plan to Use the OpenDocument Standard

September 25, 2005 Leave a comment

It's great to see that Massachusetts has finalized its plan to stop using proprietary document formats and standardize on the OASIS OpenDocument format. This wasn't about “ditching Microsoft”, as many outlets seem to be reporting. In fact, it's not about a specific vendor at all. It's about using a document format that ensures that state documents are available via an open spec. It's about ensuring that a single vendor doesn't control how a state government can access its own data. It's about state government allowing its citizens to choose how they can access data without worrying about patents and without dictating platform. In the end, it's one of the most sound decisions you'll see a US state government make. State documents need to be available for hundreds of years. That's something Microsoft cannot possibly guarantee. And it should be obvious why requiring a citizen to purchase a single application that only runs on two platforms and is only available from a single vendor to access data that is critical is not just silly, but asinine. I say good job MA – first the Boston tea party and now this ;) Hopefully we'll see some follow through here. The odd part is that the response from the Microsoft rep seemed to be of the “the customer does not have the right to define their own requirements” attitude, insinuating that you should just be happy with what Microsoft offers for a format. This attitude runs contrary to some of the reform we've seem from Microsoft recently. Maybe they won't be able to ditch their predatory monopolistic practices. Maybe they can't be trusted.
–jeremy
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Filed under Main Page, Open Source

Microsoft is Going to ReOrg

September 21, 2005 5 Comments

Microsoft is going through a reorg and Allchin is going to retire after Vista ships. Scoble likes the news (although he's pulled his comments for being too “rah rah”) and even Mini-Microsoft has hope. The one interesting thing that I've gleaned from the press release and ensuing coverage is that Microsoft is going to try to shift to more of a platform or hosted software services company. That is huge news and a huge shift. For a long time, Microsoft has focused on shipping boxed software. The most obvious change here is that MSN will be brought into the core group. Can a company that had focused on shipping boxed software morph like this and still succeed? There is going to be some huge internal struggles here, that's for sure. We may see the company polarized in a way we never have before. Some within Microsoft clearly get it, but others don't. How much the ones who don't will resist this change remains to be seen. One thing is clear though – Microsoft has seen what companies like Google and Yahoo! are doing and they want in. One classic Microsoft thing that I noticed about the release is that it had a 100% positive spin. They want you to believe that they are making all these changes because of forward looking positive reasons, not because because they took a hard look in the mirror and saw slipping ship dates, decreased profits for the first time in ages and more competition then they have seen in decades. Unlike many OSS people, I don't wish bad things on Microsoft. In fact, I'd like to see them succeed in the long run. Not in the predatory and monopolistic way that they have “succeeded” in the past, but in a fair and balanced marketplace. There could be room for everyone. Can the company deal with not being the towering #1 in ever market they're in? Can they stand to not crush every competitor by predatory and quite frankly illegal means? That remains to be seen and the companies recent history makes it really hard to trust them on almost any level. Not impossible though and if they play nice they should eventually be welcomed back into the party.
–jeremy

Filed under Main Page, Microsoft

The LSB and its Current Implementation

September 19, 2005 Leave a comment

Ulrich has some problems with the LSB standard. He makes some outstanding points and is clearly an extremely smart guy. The problem as I see it is that the current LSB is broken and badly broken at that. When the answer to a bug report is “use a slow uni-processor machine, it is known to work there”, someone should be fired. A certification with a date of 15-Sep-2005 should not be done on a 300MHz Pentium as it's not indicative of what people are running. Is all lost though? Should the LSB just be completely dropped? Maybe this particular group/spec should be, since they are clearly not doing a good job, but it should be clear on why companies like Oracle want to ship a single binary that works everywhere. If we're serious about mainstream Linux adoption, this is something that I think has to happen. Requiring companies to build for each distro is dumb. It means multiple build environments, additional testing, additional resources. In the end, it means that either the company won't ship on Linux or the company will only support a specific distribution or two. That's bad for everyone. I don't have a solid answer (and from the looks of it, no one does) but this is a problem that needs to be solved.
–jeremy
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Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

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