Open Source > Linux > LQ
December 17, 2006 Leave a comment
Here's a post about 10 people who matter in Open Source. These lists are always quite subjective and open to debate, but I think this article is interesting not for the 10 people the author chose, but for the amount of back story and information contained about the people. A couple interesting bits that I didn't know before. If that kind of thing interests you, it's worth a read.
–jeremy
Linux, Open Source
December 13, 2006 Leave a comment
Brian from MySQL has responded to this. From the linked post:
This morning I am working on a bug with Monty Taylor for a customer who is having an issue with multi-cpu capabilities on Debian. Which makes me surprised to read: http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/06/12/13/1515217.shtml
Huh?
MySQL supports Debian. We have in the past and we will continue to do so in the future.
We don't build Enterprise binaries on debian yet. The Enterprise project is new and we are just starting to roll out binaries for it.
Ubuntu is on schedule to be supported next year (I believe first quarter). We don't build binaries for Debian in part because the Debian community does a good job themselves. We have traditionally only built binaries where vendors had issues, or vendors didn't build binaries at all. The Debian community has never had this issue.
If you call MySQL and you have support we support you if you are running Debian (the same with Suse, RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu and others..).
Some developers run Debian and Ubuntu is quickly becoming the “most favored” distributions among developers for their desktop machines. Using Debian ourselves means that it gets tested dozens of times a day as developers work.
What do I suspect happened to generate the Slashdot post?
We messed up some internal communication in MySQL and someone in Sales was left with the wrong information. It happens and I can say I certainly wish it did not. There are a lot of Linux distributions and I can see where this could happen, like all companies we could do better to communicate this information internally.
The fact is though that we support it, and we are going to continue to support it. We also need to fix our internal communication.
There you have it. Great response and good to know.
–jeremy
MySQL, Open Source, Linux, Debian, Ubuntu
December 13, 2006 Leave a comment
It looks like Microsoft decided to send Rob Limo on an all expenses paid press junket to Redmond. As you may have guessed, many of his hard hitting questions weren't answered, but there are a couple interesting observations in there and he did get a free Zune for a Linux developers out of the deal. From the article:
“Well, that's not really anything I can comment on,” he replied. “I'm a product marketing guy.”
This was the kind of answer I got to all the hard questions I asked, including several suggested by Pamela Jones of Groklaw. None of the Microsoft people I met had anything to say about their deal with Novell, working with the Open Document Format (ODF), acceptance of the GNU General Public License (GPL) as a legitimate software license, how DRM built into Vista may anger users, or other topics I thought might interest you.
I came away with a sense that Microsoft doesn't currently have a clear sense of what Microsoft should be and where Microsoft should be going. I had time to buttonhole a number of employees who were not part of the planned presentations. The “Microsoft Campus” is not closed off from the world with gates and guards, but is a series of bland office buildings on ordinary public streets, so it was not hard to find employees I could question by buttonholing people near the entrances to several buildings, especially the company store (an employee-only facility where they sell Microsoft software at academic prices and Microsoft-branded hardware at a deep discount).
While I do not want to quote any Microsoft employees by name here — they really weren't supposed to talk to me — I picked up a sense that Ballmer is not universally loved, and that at least a significant minority (if not a majority) of actual software developers in the company are hoping he retires soon and that Ray Ozzie takes over. And if not Ozzie, at least someone who doesn't act as if the whole rest of the world can be divided into two groups: Microsoft customers and those who thwart Microsoft's plans.
Microsoft is not short of smart, hard-working employees. I'm sure that in many ways it's a great place to work. I also think, from what I heard during my visit and what other Microsoft employees and customers have told me at other times, that it has degenerated into a series of disconnected fiefdoms that aren't all moving in the same direction.
I agree that Microsoft has definitely lost its way in many regards. I'm not even sure that's arguable any more. I'm still surprised that Ballmer hasn't stepped down yet, but it can only be a matter of time. A Microsoft under Ozzie would be would be a whole different animal and the progression would definitely be an interesting one to watch.
–jeremy
Microsoft, Linux, MSFT, Zune, Open Source
December 13, 2006 1 Comment
I'm seeing quite a bit of rumbling that “MySQL Quietly Drops Support For Debian Linux”. Indeed they have, but not in the way people seem to be interpreting it. It is true that you can no longer purchase a support contract for MySQL Enterprise for Debian-based systems. It is not true that they have dropped all support in the product for Debian or are in some ways preventing it from running on Debian. The calls I've seen to fork the product don't seem to make much sense, unless the people forking plan on offering enterprise grade MySQL support on Debian…but that's not a fork – it's offering support. As you can see here, MySQL still offers an “Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake)” deb for the community version of the product. It was likely a business decision made where the costs of training their engineers and supporting Debian outweighed how much revenue it generated. The spin that decision ended up taking on seems odd to me. Someone in the MySQL community should probably address the issue soon, and I'd guess they will.
–jeremy
MySQL, Open Source, Linux, Debian, Ubuntu
December 11, 2006 Leave a comment
Looks like ECMA International has approved Office Open XML as an official industry standard. From the article:
ECMA International, a group of makers of both hardware and software based in Geneva that includes Microsoft, designated the Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats of Microsoft's Office Open XML as official industry standards.
Governments and businesses are often limited to buying software designated as industry standards.
Microsoft sought a standards designation for its new Office file formats after OpenDocument, a competing set of formats backed by International Business Machines, Sun and other companies, was approved in May by the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, also based in Geneva, which sets global standards.
Jan van den Beld, secretary general of ECMA International, said IBM alone among the 21 members voted against approving the Microsoft standard. Van den Beld said ECMA's general assembly, which met in Zurich, agreed to petition the ISO to declare the Microsoft format as a global standard.
Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president for open source and standards, called Microsoft's Office formats technically unwieldy – requiring software developers to absorb 6,000 pages of specifications, compared with 700 pages for OpenDocument.
“The practical effect is the only people who are going to be in a position to implement Microsoft's specifications are Microsoft,” Sutor said.
Van den Beld of ECMA International said the standard recognized reality. “The vast amount of data in the world is in Microsoft format,” he said.
A couple comments. First, kudos to IBM for standing up on this one. Next, it's clear that once again, Microsoft is only doing this because they were forced to. The success of ODF is the real driver here, not Microsoft wanting to adhere to a standard. One thing I don't like about the standard is that (at least as I read it), you must implement everything in the standard and nothing not in the standard to get a license. The only one that doesn't need to do this is Microsoft, which means that it is way too easy for them to make Office incompatible with the standard. Next, 6,000 pages of specifications does make it seem overly complex. You don't have to believe IBM though, just look at what one of the Word developers has said:
If we had to add support for Open XML to Mac Word 12 without being able to port code from Win Word, the read/write estimates shrinks down to about 8.5 man/years (44 weeks x 5 devs x 2 for read+write). Doing the work for PPT and Excel isn’t strictly a multiple of Word, because about 30% of the XML elements are shared between the three apps. So, for all of Mac Office, I’d estimate it would take a total of about 5 devs over the release cycle to add full Open XML support starting from scratch, as part of the larger project.
Read the entire post for more details, but that's a lot of work to implement when compared to the relative simplicity of ODF (which no single company controls in the way Microsoft controls OO XML). Lastly, the comment by the secretary general of ECMA International worries me a bit. It makes the process seem more like a rubber stamp than anything else.
–jeremy
Microsoft, MSFT, IBM, ODF, ECMA, Office, office open XML,
December 11, 2006 Leave a comment
It's interesting where you see Open Source related issues pop up. I don't know enough to comment on the issue, but the general story serves to underscore just how important access to source code can be.
The UK has warned America that it will cancel its £12bn order for the Joint Strike Fighter if the US does not hand over full access to the computer software code that controls the jets.
Lord Drayson, minister for defence procurement, told the The Daily Telegraph that the planes were useless without control of the software as they could effectively be “switched off” by the Americans without warning.
That means a $25B deal will potentially fall through because of source code access.
–jeremy
December 10, 2006 5 Comments
Absolutely astonishing. Remember – monopolies are bad. The sad part here is that on two separate occasions I have had conversations this frustrating with Verizon employees. Math, logic and reason seem to go out the door. As you may have guessed, I refuse to subscribe to a Verizon service at this point. Doesn't seem like much has changed since I left.
( via The Consumerist, which showed me a Verizon ad on the linked page)
–jeremy
Verizon, monopoly
December 9, 2006 Leave a comment
In a post entitled “For reasons that have little to do with the product, itself, Windows Vista simply can't lose”, Robert X. Cringely points out why Vista will be a winner. From the article:
Windows Vista is finally here, a shadow of what it was once supposed to be, but here nonetheless, and now the pundits are holding forth on whether or not Microsoft's new operating system will succeed. What a waste of good punditry: of course Vista will succeed, and those who think it will fail simply do not know what they are talking about.
There have been good operating systems from Microsoft and bad operating systems from Microsoft, but of those only one that I know of can truly be said to have failed — Bob, the so-called social interface operating system I always figured was really named after me.
Bob was a functional failure, a user catastrophe, but Microsoft had weathered those before. Remember DOS 4? What might have made Bob fail was its design, which was flawed to say the least, or as my mother would put it — crappy. But what ALLOWED Bob to fail was something much different — the fact that the operating system wasn't strategic for Microsoft OR for users. Nobody needed Bob and nobody was forced to use him against their will, which sounds a lot like my old dating life but is actually more profound than that. Microsoft practically guaranteed that Bob would fail by creating no artificial situation (say the forced retirement of the last pre-Bob OS) that forced people to use Bob whether they wanted to or not.
Microsoft — a company that eventually learns from its mistakes — will not make that particular mistake again, certainly not with Windows Vista, in which they have a $5 billion investment.
What we'll see for ourselves and read about over the next six months, then, are users complaining about Vista instability, an inevitably emerging vulnerability to hackers, and applications that don't work as well as they do under XP. Enterprise customers will hold back in droves. But does any of that make Vista a failure? Nope.
He contends that since Microsoft basically has the ability to force Vista on the market, it simply can't lose. You know what – he's right, at least for certain definitions of win and lose. Because most people simply go to the store and purchase a new PC without even knowing what an Operating System is, they will almost assuredly get Vista with the next PC they buy. While many corporations make slightly more educated decisions, for other reasons including compatibility and the perception that choosing Microsoft is safe they will also eventually go to Vista in many cases. You can be certain though that we won't be seeing droves of people upgrading for some whiz bang feature that Vista holds. In a way, while from a market share perspective that makes Vista a winner, I think it will still be a loser in the grand scheme of things. There is a very real chance that this upgrade cycle is the last one where Microsoft is the 100% default choice. With both Apple and multiple Linux distributions gaining traction, if I were Microsoft I would have seen this as a chance to get a fabulous release out to solidify mindshare in the market. Instead you have a product that has been stripped of almost all of the promised innovation and interesting features, but still way late to market. You end up with a loser that will still make tens of millions of dollars of profit.
–jeremy
Microsoft, MSFT, Vista, Windows, Linux, Apple, Cringely
December 6, 2006 3 Comments
LQ has taken another small step in its continued growth and maturity. We now use a CDN, or Content Delivery Network. The most well known CDN company around is probably Akamai, but there are many others. If you're not sure what a CDN is, Wikipedia defines it as:
a system of computers networked together across the Internet that cooperate transparently to deliver content (especially large media content) to end users.
CDN nodes are deployed in multiple locations, often over multiple backbones. These nodes cooperate with each other to satisfy requests for content by end users, transparently moving content behind the scenes to optimize the delivery process.
Basically, all images are now served by the CDN which means they should be much closer to you from a network perspective, especially if you're not located in the USA (where our servers are). While in the over grand scheme of things this is a small step, I think it's an exciting one. There is a very real cost associated with doing this, but it's important to me that the LQ experience is all that it can be. So the real question is – can you tell a difference? I'd appreciate any feedback you may have on this, as it will help us decide if this is something worth doing for the long haul. For comparisons sake, we implemented this at about 1700LQST (some people also refer to this as EST) today. Thanks.
–jeremy
CDN, Content Delivery Network, Linux, Open Source
December 5, 2006 Leave a comment
As promised, here's an update on the official word regarding the FSF's opinion on the legality of the patent portion of the recent Microsoft Novell deal.
However, there's another way of using software patents to threaten the users which we have just seen an example of. That is, the Novell-Microsoft deal. What has happened is, Microsoft has not given Novell a patent licence, and thus, section 7 of GPL version 2 does not come into play. Instead, Microsoft offered a patent licence that is rather limited to Novell's customers alone.
It turns out that perhaps it's a good thing that Microsoft did this now, because we discovered that the text we had written for GPL version 3 would not have blocked this, but it's not too late and we're going to make sure that when GPL version 3 really comes out it will block such deals. We were already concerned about possibilities like this, namely, the possibility that a distributor might receive a patent licence which did not explicitly impose limits on downstream recipients but simply failed to protect them.
Well, now that we have seen this possibility, we're not going to have trouble drafting the language that will block it off. We're going to say not just that if you receive the patent licence, but if you have arranged any sort of patent licensing that is prejudicial among the downstream recipients, that that's not allowed. That you have to make sure that the downstream recipients fully get the freedoms that they're supposed to have. The precise words, we haven't figured out yet. That's what Eben Moglen is working on now.
So there you have it: definitely legal under the GPLv2 and they'll do everything they can to make sure it's not legal under the GPLv3. How this will impact GPLv3 uptake remains to be seen.
–jeremy
Stallman, RMS, GPL, GPLv3, FSF, Novell, Microsoft
Jeremy's Blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.