How Microsoft & Massachusetts played hardball over open standards

December 5, 2006 Leave a comment

A great article based on over 300 emails obtained under the Massachusetts Public Records Law (which looks like a state variety of the Federal Freedom of Information Act). The article contains a ton of information and if this is a topic that you're interested in (NOTE: it should be!), then I suggest you read the whole thing. A couple of snippets:
Less than a week after he became CIO of Massachusetts last February, Louis Gutierrez sensed a serious threat to his power — one that was being promoted by a seemingly unlikely source. Within a matter of days, Gutierrez confirmed that Brian Burke, Microsoft Corp.’s government affairs director for the Northeast, had been backing an amendment to an economic stimulus bill that would largely strip the Massachusetts Information Technology Division of its decision-making authority.
For Microsoft, the call to arms had sounded several months earlier, when the state’s IT division surprised the company with a controversial decision to adopt the Open Document Format for Office Applications, or ODF, as its standard file format. Even worse, from Microsoft’s perspective, the policy stipulated that new desktop applications acquired by state agencies feature built-in support for ODF, a standard developed and promoted by some of its rivals — most prominently, IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc.
The amendment Burke was promoting had the potential to stop the ODF policy dead in its tracks by giving a government task force and the secretary of state’s office approval rights on IT standards and procurement policies. Gutierrez, who resigned last month over a funding dispute that appeared to be unrelated to the ODF controversy, clearly was rankled by Burke’s involvement with the amendment. Yet he made no attempt to shut the door on Microsoft. On the contrary, he did the opposite.
Does it worry anyone else that a company, Microsoft or not, is lobbying to strip the decision making power from a state IT Division? How this isn't stirring monopoly rumblings is beyond me. Also from the article:
“I am certain that Brian was involved,” Yates wrote to Gutierrez in response to the CIO’s March 3 message about Burke’s role in lobbying for the amendment. But Yates claimed that Burke’s intention was “to have a ‘vehicle’ in the legislature” to address a policy that Microsoft viewed as “unnecessarily exclusionary.” Burke’s aim was “not specifically to transfer agency authority,” Yates wrote.
He also asserted that the Morrissey amendment “was developed and is promoted by others who were/are very inflamed by your predecessors’ handling of many things.” The predecessors Yates referred to were Kriss and Peter Quinn, who was CIO before Gutierrez and had cited the Morrissey amendment as one of the contributing factors when he resigned last January.
During his interview with Computerworld, Yates was adamant that neither Microsoft nor anyone on its payroll had authored the amendment. In response to questions about the company’s lobbying activities, he said, “At the time, our public affairs people were — you can call it lobbying — but they were in fact trying to educate people to the real issues in the mandate for ODF. And we were, yes, arguing against it — absolutely.”
Having a Microsoft representative claim a policy was “unnecessarily exclusionary” after some of the moves that Microsoft have made is ironic at best. It should be clear to everyone that Government documents being in a proprietary format that is controlled by a single corporate entity is not in the best interest of that Government or its citizens. An Open format should be mandatory for all Government documents, and I hope some day it is. If Office supports that format than I have absolutely no problem with it being used, as long as it's not being used because Microsoft has the most lobbying dollars. It's my hope that the USA is finally sick of the corruption that is currently rampant and back door deals that are not in the best interest of the citizens carry such a negative stigma that they stop.
–jeremy
, , , , ,

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Microsoft, Open Source

Novell Boosts OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office Interoperability

December 4, 2006 Leave a comment

The previous post covered an article about Open Standards that ended with the following:
When Gutierrez announced his resignation as Massachusetts CIO in early October, he cited the legislature’s failure to pass a bond bill that included funding for key IT projects. Since the bill also would have funded non-IT projects, the stall didn’t appear to be directly tied to any remaining opposition to the ODF policy.
Ironically, on Nov. 2, Gutierrez’s last day as CIO, Microsoft announced an agreement with Novell Inc. that included a pledge to cooperate on development of translation software to improve the way ODF and Open XML work together.
What a difference nine months had made.
Here's some more information on that Novell announcement:
Novell today announced that the Novell® edition of the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite will now support the Office Open XML format, increasing interoperability between OpenOffice.org and the next generation of Microsoft Office. Novell is cooperating with Microsoft and others on a project to create bi-directional open source translators for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office, with the word processing translator to be available first, by the end of January 2007. The translators will be made available as plug-ins to Novell’s OpenOffice.org product. Novell will release the code to integrate the Open XML format into its product as open source and submit it for inclusion in the OpenOffice.org project. As a result, end users will be able to more easily share files between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org, as documents will better maintain consistent formats, formulas and style templates across the two office productivity suites.
“Novell supports the OpenDocument format as the default file format in OpenOffice.org because it provides customer choice and flexibility, but interoperability with Microsoft Office has also been critical to the success of OpenOffice.org,” said Nat Friedman, Novell chief technology and strategy officer for Open Source. “OpenOffice.org is very important to Novell, and as our customers deploy Linux* desktops across their organizations, they're telling us that sharing documents between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office is a must-have. The addition of Open XML support reflects Novell's commitment to providing enterprise customers the tools they need to be successful, from the desktop to the data center.”
Some are calling this an OOo fork, which seems a little bit disingenuous. The add-in is BSD licensed, so OOo would be more than able to merge this upstream if they so desire. As more details get released on the recent Microsoft/Novell deal though, it's becoming clear that Microsoft got a bit more than was at first obvious. They have a lot of lawyers, so this should come as no surprise. The last article showed how important it is to Microsoft that OpenXML be considered an “Open” Standard. The ability for them to keep a large amount of Office installs may actually depend on it. This move will almost certainly lend credence to their claims, especially in the eyes of legislators who are unlikely to understand the finer points of the issue. That could end up being loss, not only for Open Source, but for the push for Open Standards. This issue is too important for it to be decided for the wrong reasons. It's an issue I'll definitely be keeping a close eye on.
–jeremy
, , , , , ,

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Microsoft, Novell, Open Source

OSDL restructures; CEO leaves, nine employees dismissed

December 4, 2006 2 Comments

It looks like the OSDL is going through another significant restructuring. From the article:
The Open Source Development Labs has announced a restructuring, including the departure of CEO Stuart Cohen and layoffs of nine employees working for the organization. Mike Temple, the current CFO of OSDL, will be taking over as the chief operating officer.
Click here to find out more!
Linus Torvalds, whose work on the Linux kernel is sponsored by OSDL, was not affected by the job cuts. OSDL has 19 full-time employees remaining after the layoffs. The company has not said how many contractors are still working with OSDL.
No one from OSDL was available to speak for this story, but OSDL did send out a statement with information about the job cuts and restructuring. According to the statement, OSDL is going to continue to provide a “safe haven” for key open source developers, including Torvalds.
While it's good to see that Linus wasn't impacted, this is the second restructuring for the OSDL in a fairly short time. One has to hope that the organization is viable long term as they currently contribute quite a bit to Linux development. There's no official post on the OSDL site yet, and I haven't seen any info on whether the recently announced kernel documentation project will be impacted. Cohen said he is “looking forward to forming a venture to explore open source joint development using best practices in collaboration and building communities.” This is a terrible time of the year to lose a job (not that any time is a great time, but right before the holidays is even worse) and I wish all those impacted the best of luck in finding gainful employment in the Open Source wold in an expedient manner.
–jeremy
, , ,

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

Oracle questions GPL open sourced Java

December 2, 2006 1 Comment

It appears that Oracle is siding with IBM on the issue of the Open Source license for Java. From the article:
Steven Harris told Computer Business Review he believed the release of the Java code as open source would be beneficial, but questioned whether the Santa Clara, California-based company would have been better advised to have released it under an Apache license.
“It's a good thing that they're open sourcing it, and it opens up access to people who previously considered there were barriers to it,” he said, while noting that “those barriers were pretty low” in the first place.
However, he also repeated comments made by IBM Corp that the choice of the GNU GPL made the project incompatible with existing projects under the Apache and Eclipse initiatives.
“The most active Java communities are Apache and Eclipse. It is unfortunate that they did not provide a path that would allow these projects to grow,” said Harris. “The community is in Apache and Eclipse. Sun's choice creates a new community.”
Sun responded:
Speaking to Computer Business Review earlier this month Sun's chief open source officer, Simon Phipps, explained that using the GPL would overcome fears about license compatibility with Linux. “We've been working on the Java platform for a considerable time and we've got to the point where we're considering 'how do we grow the market',” he said.
“The most important thing is that that the Java platform is not included in many GNU Linux distributions.” Choosing the GPL, which is already used for Linux, avoids that issue, he explained. “Java now becomes the development platform of choice for enterprise GNU Linux users.”
I think this example is an indication of part of the problem some have with license proliferation (and note that these are two of the most popular Open Source licenses). Sun is basically in a position that it has to choose between Linux compatibility and Eclipse/Apache compatibility, or license Java under a myriad of licenses (which is really not an optimal situation). Someone is likely going to lose here, which is a shame since we're on the same team and have the same goals. Unfortunately I don't have an answer to the problem. Fortunately, people much smarter than me are working on it ;)
–jeremy
, , , , , , , , ,

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source, Oracle, Sun

Q&A: Novell CEO gives behind-the-scenes account of deal with Microsoft

November 30, 2006 Leave a comment

In a previous post I wondered what was on the mind of the execs at Novell after the recent Microsoft agreement. Computerworld has just posted a Q&A with CEO Ron Hovsepian. From the article:
How did the agreement with Microsoft come to pass? Who approached whom, and when? This past May, I picked up the phone and called Kevin Turner, the COO at Microsoft. I knew Kevin when he was the CIO at Wal-Mart. I said, “Kevin, I'd like to have a conversation about what the customer needs. If you could put back on your old hat as a customer, if I came in and started talking to you about virtualization on Linux, and this Microsoft guy showed up and started talking to you about virtualization on Windows, what would you say to us?” Kevin, being a good ex-IT executive, said, “I'd want both of those things together. I don't want the fighting; I don't want to deal with it. I'd tell you two guys to go figure out how to make it work.” I said, “Well, that's why I'm calling. How do we make that work around virtualization?”
My point of view is that customers are going to have J2EE stacks and .Net stacks in their shops. If I'm a CIO, that's what I'm dealing with: “What are you guys doing to make my life easier to make those things work together?” I saw virtualization as a key to us being able to do that in a different manner than we have in the past. That was the genesis of the whole conversation: calling up an old customer and having a conversation at the customer level. And then it took a lot of twists and turns.
and
What was your reaction when you heard about Ballmer's “undisclosed balance sheet liability” comments? Did you feel like you'd been blindsided? You don't want to get caught off-guard on any of those things. I do know things can be taken out of context, so I never overreact too far one way or the other. Obviously, I was disappointed, because the heart and essence of the deal was around the technology collaboration and what we want to get done for the customer. I know they're very committed to that — we've been having our regular conference calls with Bob Muglia [senior vice president of Microsoft's server and tools business]. We're right on our schedule to get all the details out in a reasonable time period.
We do not see any infringements, and we are not going to agree to any. Their desire to do some things around IP [intellectual property] came up as one of the things they wanted to talk about. We said, “Sure, we'd be happy to talk about some of those IP things,” because we have our own portfolio of IP, and we saw that when you look at the math, the balance of trade was $108 million to us and $40 million to them.
We never changed our position. All I cared about was, I lost a deal with a large retailer to Microsoft for the first time about 12 or 18 months ago. It was going to be an all-Linux deal, and I lost it because they were unduly influenced, in my opinion, to be fearful of these [IP and indemnity issues]. From my point of view that was really too bad, because Linux lost. Then I watched it happen three more times.
I think it's clear that Novell had good intentions going into this. I still question, from a business perspective, doing a deal like this with a company who has the record of Microsoft when it comes to business partnerships. It could be that it was perceived that this was the best way to keep Novell going. You can't fault anyone for that. I'm not sure this deal would have prevented them from losing the deals he mentions, and that's really the problem Novell is facing. We'll have to watch and see if they can turn things around.
–jeremy
, , , , ,

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Microsoft, Novell, Open Source

A Correction to a Recent OLPC Story

November 29, 2006 Leave a comment

In a recent post about OLPC I erroneously stated that Jim Gettys was a Red Hat employee. Dave Jones has kindly pointed out that Jim is in fact an OLPC employee. My apologizes for that and thanks for the correction.
–jeremy
, , ,

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source, Red Hat

Credit Suisse Writes Off Novell

November 29, 2006 Leave a comment

A quick follow up on Novell. While I expected them to take a bit of punishment from the Open Source community for the recent patent deal some previous coverage, I didn't expect them to take any punishment from Wall Street. If anything, I expected them to get rewarded by the street. It looks like at least one analyst has actually downgraded them as a direct result of the deal though. From a sys-con article (which is an absolutely horrific site that very consistently crashes my browser):
Credit Suisse analyst Jason Maynard took down Novell on Monday grading it an “Underperform.” He reckons the flurry in its stock after its alliance with Microsoft was based on a “one-time event” – Microsoft paying Novell $308 million net – and that the 10% appreciation in the stock isn't sustainable.”
“Rather than provide a growth engine for the company,” he wrote in a note. “We think Novell's Linux patent deal with Microsoft will hurt the company's standing in the open source community. We don't see Microsoft providing a sustainable lift to Novell's distribution woes. With Oracle entering the market, we doubt there will be enough room to support needed Linux market share gains. Finally, Novell's legacy NetWare business continues to decline, and the level at which revenue can be sustained is unknown.”
Maynard figures Novell will spend Microsoft's money on acquisitions, both to diversify and to support its systems management and identity interests. He also figures Novell will restructure again but without any material upside.
Now it's clear that Novell is having some business issues. It's the reason they have a new CEO. To see “will hurt the company's standing in the open source community” in an analyst downgrade though is a first for me I think. I wonder what the C-level execs at Novell are thinking right about now?
–jeremy
, , , , ,

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Microsoft, Novell, Open Source

The French Say Au Revoir to Microsoft Software

November 29, 2006 1 Comment

The article title is a bit dramatic, but it looks like the French parliament is considering moving to Linux on both the desktop and server. From the article:
Starting in June of next year, French deputies will use desktops and servers running Linux, Mozilla's Firefox Web browser, and OpenOffice.org, a free open-source alternative to Microsoft's Office software.
For day-to-day documents, French members of parliament and their staff will use OpenOffice.org, currently in version 2.0.4 and designed to compete directly with Microsoft's Office System.
Why the change? The French parliament, composed of an upper chamber (le Senat, or Senate) and a lower chamber (l'Assemblee Nationale, or National Assembly), believes it can save money using open-source software, despite the near-term costs of switching from Microsoft systems and retraining all employees.
But that is a matter of some debate.
“The evidence on the cost savings attributable to a switch to Linux has been mixed,” according to Chris Swenson, director of software industry analysis at research group NPD. “There has been some evidence that companies have to spend a good deal on training and support after you deploy the operating system.”
The information is non-specific enough and far enough out that you have to wonder if they're just trying to get a better deal on Microsoft products. That being said, it's becoming clear that in the Government sector it's going to be the EU that leads the charge in Open Source adoption. The arguments for Open Source in Government are extremely compelling and something I've covered before. When you are controlling the data for an entire nation it's critical that you use Open Standards to ensure you have access to your own records in perpetuity. Controlling your own destiny in this context is critical. It's not a luxury, it's a requirement and it should be fairly obvious why being beholden to a single corporation is undesirable. If they do decide to move ahead on this, you have to assume that Mandriva (a French company) will make a very strong push. National Governments typically like to spend in their own country if it's at all possible.
There is one argument against leaving Windows and Office that I think is a bit over hyped these days. That's the issue of training. Yes, if you switch to OpenOffice.org and Linux you will have to retrain some users, especially the non-technical ones (which in almost any business are the majority). But looking at the upcoming versions of Office and Windows, they are sufficiently different from the older versions (especially in the case of Office) that you'll need to retrain those same users anyway! The incremental difference in training costs in this case is likely negligible and possibly nil. If you're looking to migrate to an Open Source solution, your next Windows and Office upgrade iteration is a perfect time to consider it. Keep in mind that staging the upgrade will likely gain you much better results with much less pain. OOo runs just fine on Windows. A switch from IE to Firefox and Office to OpenOffice.org will get your users comfortable with Open Source. Switching to Linux will then be much less of a change. After all, most people don't really “use” an operating system – they use the applications.
–jeremy
, , , , ,

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Microsoft, Open Source

Novell Dumps the Hula Project

November 28, 2006 Leave a comment

Conspiracy theorists of the Open Source community unite; Novell has just dropped official support for Hula shortly after announcing their agreement with Microsoft. For those unfamiliar with Hula, here's a snippet from the original press release just over 18 months ago:
BOSTON (LinuxWorld Conference& Expo 2005) — Feb. 15, 2005 — Novell today announced the formation of Hula, a new community project to create an open source collaboration server. The server will provide innovative calendar and mail functionality, filling a major void among open source offerings. Hula will be based on code taken from Novell's NetMail collaboration server product, an award-winning, proven technology foundation with an installed base of more than 4 million users.
Novell has donated the core components of NetMail to provide a starting point for the Hula project. Hula today includes standards-based e-mail, calendaring and address book functionality that can scale to 250,000 registered users on a single PC with 50,000 simultaneously connected users. Novell's contribution of such a significant product into open source – more than 200,000 lines of source code – demonstrates Novell's continuing commitment to promoting open source as well as the company's deepening involvement in helping to lead key community initiatives.
So do I think Novell ditching their Exchange replacement is directly related to the Microsoft deal? Realistically, probably not. I know it's hard for some to believe, but it's not always about Microsoft. The truth is, the project never really seemed to gain much traction. It's a shame, because an Open Source Exchange replacement is a critical missing piece right now. I can't emphasize this enough. Many shops I see use Windows (and in some cases end up ditching Linux in an effort to have only one server platform) solely because of Exchange. It's also a shame because Hula showed some promise. While I thought it was odd that they chose to rewrite some of the services instead of just using something tried and true like Postfix, some of the features Hula promised looked very nice. Luckily the project lives on and in the Open Source spirit I hope someone picks it up. Without a corporate sponsor though, it's unlikely a project like this will get much enterprise uptake. Luckily Zimbra just keeps getting better and better every time I look at it. With SOX compliance promised soon, Zimbra could be well positioned to give Exchange a run for its money.
–jeremy
, , , , , ,

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Microsoft, Novell, Open Source

Oracle Linux, Distributions, Redux

November 28, 2006 1 Comment

It's interesting to read what a well known and well respected MySQL Employee has to say, not only about Oracle Linux specifically but about the state of Linux distributions in general. A couple snippets:
First, I'm really unhappy with the state of Linux distributions today. Its a tower of babel for the most part. Its a hope that the LSB will solve some of this, but today shipping on Linux is a real mess. Upgrading is a mess, especially for applications developed to rely on a stable platform.
Redhat ES is still the 800lb gorilla. Problem is that its too expensive when you get thousands of servers (or even a hundred). There was a day and an age where libc problems kept rearing their heads but that seems to be mostly over. I'm not going to pay what they want me to pay. They don't present me with a value proposition that I like. I used to buy one copy of it each time it was released to keep my servers upgraded, but I stopped that after RH9.
I'd like to see a winning Linux distribution, but right now the race is wide open as far as I am concerned. Fedora could improve on upgrades to the point where I was happy with it. Oracle could innovate and create a platform that ISVs would consider stable. Ubuntu could get a major win and we see sites move to it. Redhat could realize that they have created profit by creating a ceiling for adoption and find a new way to profit (since that ceiling is only going to drop…).
I agree with much of what he has to say. I've posted multiple times on what I think about RHEL pricing, so I won't get into that again. I've had considerably better luck than Brian with Debian it would seem and I would _never_ recommend you run Fedora on a production server (ever). I've also been meaning to take a closer look at rPath, and when I get a chance to I'll post an update. The fact that a MySQL employee is so openly willing to try a Linux distribution from a substantial competitor (I know, MySQL AB officially claims they are not competing with Oracle… I obviously disagree ;) really says a lot about the mentality of the average Open Source enthusiast. It's not just about squashing your competitors and creating your own silo, it's about technology, innovation, tinkering and curiosity. It's about creating genuine value and breaking down barriers, not holding clients captive and creating artificial barriers.
–jeremy
, , , , ,

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source, Oracle

← Older posts

Newer posts →