Unbreakable Linux: The untold story

April 5, 2007 Leave a comment

Mike Olson, vice president of Embedded Technologies at Oracle, recently posted an interesting entry on his blog about Unbreakable Linux (via Matt). The article details why RHEL was chosen and how Oracle contributes to Linux. Keep in mind that Mike works for Oracle, but via the Sleepycat aquisition. He knows Open Source. Now, I never found it odd that Oracle chose RHEL. I’d have found it odd if they chose anything else in fact. In the Oracle Linux space, Red Hat dominates. I did wonder why the respun CentOS though. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. They’re directly competing with Red Hat with Red Hat’s own product. Sure the GPL allows that. I just don’t think it makes sense from a business perspective. Not when they could have partnered with Red Hat and gotten 95% the same thing. The 5% will make a real difference in the long run. As a major partner, they would have been providing real value to Red Hat. This in turn would encourage Red Hat to provide value to them. Early access to code, development road maps, etc. Enterprise customers would have gotten the proverbial one neck to choke (which the really do like) and Oracle would have been the single point of contact for Linux support on the RHEL product for their customers. The way they have it now, they will be in a perpetual state of playing catchup with new RHEL releases, with no help from Red Hat. In the end, what they wanted to do made a ton of sense… I just don’t think they went about it the best way. How it will play out long term remains to be seen.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Open Source, Oracle, Red Hat

Open source expert speaks out on GPLv3

April 4, 2007 Leave a comment

If you’re following the GPLv3 draft process (previous coverage) here’s an extremely informative post by Mark Radcliffe. From the post:

Mark Radcliffe joins us this week to give his expert opinion on the latest draft of GPLv3. Mark is a friend and one of the industry’s premier IP attorneys, especially with open source licensing questions. He is outside counsel for the OSI and chairs Committee C in the GPLv3 drafting process.

In other words, he knows his stuff.

Dave and I invited Mark to contribute to Open Sources on GPLv3. Here’s his response:

The most recent draft of the GPLv3 was released on Wednesday, March 28. This guest blog will summarize the legal issues in the draft and some of the open issues. I have been involved in the process since the beginning because I am the chair of Committee C, the Users Committee, and I serve as outside general counsel on a pro bono basis for the Open Source Initiative. These comments are mine alone and do not represent the views of any of my clients.

The draft is part of a year long process of preparing the first new version of the GPL in fifteen years. The existing version of the General Public License (“GPLv2”) is, by far, the most widely used open source license: more than 70% of open source projects on SourceForge are licensed under GPLv2. GPLv2 is used by many well known programs such as the MySQL database and the Linux operating system.

He then goes on to detail, at a high level, the changes that have been made in this draft. He also explains what the rest of the draft process will look like.

–jeremy

Filed under GPL, GPLv3, Linux, Open Source

Oracle Linux adopters labelled 'idiots'

April 2, 2007 Leave a comment

Just ran across this odd story over at ZNNet AU. From the article:

One of the first converts to Oracle’s support for Linux has revealed the public backlash it has endured since their decision to drop Red Hat.

Melbourne company Opes Prime Stockbroking told ZDNet Australia that in the weeks following its announcement to adopt Oracle Linux, upset Linux enthusiasts phoned, e-mailed and wrote about the company online to complain at the decision.

“People called us out of the blue to tell us we were idiots,” said Opes executive director Anthony Blumberg.

He also fielded a call from an unhappy Red Hat Australia and New Zealand managing director Max McLaren.

I’m not familiar with Opes Prime Stockbroking and hadn’t seen any bashing going on, but I have trouble imaging why any Linux enthusiast would take the time to do something like that. If they did, it’s surely not indicative of the attitude of the larger Linux community. Looking at the history, the company seems like a prime target for the Oracle product anyway. First, they weren’t even a Red Hat customer. They had acquired the licenses through Dell, which means Dell provides the first level of support…not RHT. Second, the company has a very small number of servers, but is a heavy Oracle user (both database and application server). If this story is true, and isn’t the result of some misguided astroturfing, I hope it doesn’t end up reflecting poorly on the greater ecosystem. The level of professionalism I have seen recently in the Open Source realm is second to none. It’s a shame when a disingenuous few tarnish the hard earned reputation of most.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Open Source, Oracle, Red Hat

GPLv3, Microsoft/Novell language

April 2, 2007 2 Comments

A quick follow up to this post, Allison Randal has posted a good piece of some of the GPL modifications over at the O’Reilly Radar. From the post:

The core of the added language is:

You may not convey a covered work if you are a party to an arrangement with a third party that is in the business of distributing software, under which you make payment to the third party based on the extent of your activity of conveying the work, and under which the third party grants, to any of the parties who would receive the covered work from you, a patent license (a) in connection with copies of the covered work conveyed by you, and/or copies made from those, or (b) primarily for and in connection with specific products or compilations that contain the covered work, which license does not cover, prohibits the exercise of, or is conditioned on the non-exercise of any of the rights that are specifically granted to recipients of the covered work under this License.

Translating that into plain English, it says: If you distribute GPLd software and make a deal with another company who also distributes (some kind of) software, we will stop you from distributing the GPLd software if:
a) you pay the other company
b) the deal mentions the GPLd software
c) you get a patent license
d) the patent license mentions the GPLd software
e) the patent license has more limited terms than the GPL license on the software

She then goes through some of her objections with the terms. The part that I most agree with and have covered before is:

My fourth objection is embodied in the old adage “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The FSF had success in the past accomplishing one goal with a license, so now they’re trying to accomplish a broad range of goals using the same tool. But a license really isn’t the best tool to accomplish some of these goals. Particularly, it’s not a good tool for attempting to abolish software patents or prevent companies from making patent agreements.

A license is simply not the place for every battle. That being said, it’s very good to see things moving in the right direction. The FSF seems to be taking feedback very seriously and this draft has been received much better than previous ones. I’m hopeful that when the final draft hits, most items will have been ironed out.

–jeremy

Filed under FSF, GPL, GPLv3, Open Source

Torvalds 'pretty pleased' about new GPL 3 draft

March 29, 2007 1 Comment

The 3rd draft of the GPLv3 has been released, and it’s great to see that Linus is “pretty pleased” with it. Despite what same are saying, I think that Linus’ opinion on this matters quite a bit. He started one of the most successful GPL projects ever. Him rejecting the GPLv3 has the potential to create a huge fissure in the GPL landscape. From the article:

“I’m actually pretty pleased. Not because I think it’s perfect, but simply because I think it’s certainly a lot better than I really expected from the previous drafts,” he said. “Whether it’s actually a better license than the GPLv2, I’m still a bit skeptical, but at least it’s now ‘I’m skeptical’ rather than ‘Hell no!'”

In particular, one provision against digital rights management has been narrowed, and another that Torvalds feared could lead to multiple incompatible versions of the GPL has been removed or defanged.

“I’m much happier with many parts of it. I think much of it reads better, and some of the worst horrors have been removed entirely,” Torvalds said.

Torvalds was noncommittal about whether he might try to move the Linux kernel to GPL 3–a change that would require the permission not just of Torvalds but also of all other Linux kernel copyright holders. But he didn’t rule it out.

“The current draft makes me think it’s at least a possibility in theory, but whether it’s practical and worth it is a totally different thing,” he said. “Practically speaking, it would involve a lot of work to make sure everything relevant is GPLv3-compatible even if we decided that the GPL 3 is OK.”

I’ve not had a chance to look through the new draft thoroughly, but I’m not a lawyer anyway and my opinion on the subject hardly matters. The FSF had previously intimated that this new draft would prevent deals like the recent Novell Microsoft patent covenant. For it’s part, Novell seems to think this is not the case. From a Novell blog post:

Here’s Novell’s position on the new draft:

We will continue to distribute Linux. Nothing in this new draft of GPL3 inhibits Novell’s ability to include GPL3 technologies in SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE, and other Novell open source offerings, now and in the future. This is good news for our customers.
We are firmly committed to continuing the partnership with Microsoft and, as we always have, fully complying with the terms of the licenses for the software that we ship, including software licensed under GPL3. If the final version of the GPL3 does potentially impact the agreement we have with Microsoft, we’ll address that with Microsoft.

A cursory glance would seem in indicate that the following clause is the addition made by the FSF:
Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor’s essential patent claims in its contribution, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contribution.

I don’t know enough about legalese to suss out whether that would actually invalidate the MSFT-NOVL agreement, however it is extremely encouraging to see that things are heading in the right direction.

–jeremy

Filed under GPL, GPLv3, Linux, Novell, Open Source

LQ Wiki reaches 3,000 articles

March 27, 2007 Leave a comment

The LQ Wiki just reached 3,000 articles today. This is a goal we’ve been chasing for a little while. While reaching this goal took slightly longer than I had anticipated, participation at the LQ Wiki has really been picking up lately (which is fantastic). We have a number of very high quality regular contributors and traffic in general has been steadily growing. The recent addition of OpenID should also serve to further encourage participation. If you haven’t contributed yet, head over and take a look. You can choose either the CC by-sa license or the GFDL, so all your contributions will remain freely redistributable. As always, if you have any feedback, do let us know.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, LinuxQuestions.org, Open Source, OpenID

The Torvalds Transcript: Why I 'Absolutely Love' GPL Version 2

March 22, 2007 Leave a comment

An InformationWeek article (via Matt) delves into how Linus feels about the GPLv3. This is a topic I’ve covered before, but the interview has some good explanations:

Linus: First off, I don’t even know what the GPLv3 will look like. I would be totally crazy to accept a license for my code sight unseen. I think people who just say “version 2 or any later version” on their code probably don’t care about the license of their code enough. Before I say that “yes, you can use my code under license X,” I’d better know *what* that license is.

So that’s an issue totally independent of any particular GPLv3 details. The reason Linux has that “GPLv2 only” language is exactly that I simply don’t want to be at the mercy of somebody else when it comes to something as important as the license I choose for my code.

So I can’t even imagine why anybody would ever expect me to do anything but “v2 only.” It’s just stupid to do anything else.

Now, totally independently of that, I’m doubly happy that I long, long since made that decision because at least the drafts of the GPLv3 have been much worse than the GPLv2 is. They’ve had glaring technical problems (license proliferation with not just one single GPLv3, but “GPLv3 with various additional rights and various additional restrictions”), and while I certainly hope that the final GPLv3 won’t have those obvious problems, I’ve been singularly unimpressed with the drafts.

Finally, the real basic issue is that I think the Free Software Foundation simply doesn’t have goals that I can personally sign up to. For example, the FSF considers proprietary software to be something evil and immoral.

Me, I just don’t care about proprietary software. It’s not “evil” or “immoral,” it just doesn’t matter. I think that Open Source can do better, and I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is by working on Open Source, but it’s not a crusade — it’s just a superior way of working together and generating code.

I’ve never understood the “or any later version” clause either. You’re basically implicitly trusting whomever runs the FSF in perpetuity. That seems like a bad idea, regardless of whether you trust RMS now or not. He continues:

So the FSF and I really don’t agree on some very fundamental things. I absolutely love the GPLv2 — because it embodies that “develop in the open” model. So with the GPLv2, we had a thing where everybody could come around it, and share in that model.

But the FSF seems to want to change the model, and the GPLv3 drafts have not been about developing code in the open, they’ve been about what you can do with that code. To go back to the science example, it’s like saying that not only should the science be peer-reviewed and open, but you also add the requirement that you cannot use it to build a bomb.

Matt puts it well when he says “We need to be careful about trying to thwart all future wrongdoing with present understanding. It’s just fraught with difficulty..” It does seem like the FSF may be trying to do a bit more with a software license than they should. That being said, the GPLv2 has been a spectacular success, so they clearly know what they are doing. I’m really hoping the next draft clears some of these issues up, but I fear that the recent Novell-Microsoft patent deal may make the FSF even more ardent in some of the sections.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Open Source

Living (and dying) with Linux in the workplace

March 22, 2007 Leave a comment

Here’s another look at a person documenting an attempted switch to Linux. This time it’s Sharon Machlis, Computerworld’s online managing editor. The article is an educational read, and it comes down to the same thing it has to for a while now. Linux is ready. For users at both edges, the switch will be mostly painless and you’ll find yourself with a better system in no time. If you’re in the middle, you may find that an app you depend on simply isn’t compatible with Linux. In many office environments, this can make a Linux switch non sequitur. When you’ve been in the Linux world a long time, it’s easy to forget things like this. It’s good to get steady reminders. It frames things in a useful manner and keeps you grounded. Here is Sharon’s conclusion:

I expected to be a poster child for the next wave of Linux desktop adopters. I wanted to be. I like the whole idea of a technically macho, open-source operating system — one that doesn’t assume we all must be protected from an operating system’s inner workings. I don’t fear command lines, and enjoy fiddling around with programming.

It turns out that an intermediate-level power user may not be the ideal next desktop Linux demographic.

It was possible for me to do most, but not all, of my work on a Linux system. There are some applications I’d miss if I were to make the switch permanently, but I believe I could adequately replace them after sufficient research and time rewriting scripts.

There are a few other applications I definitely need access to from time to time and that won’t run on Linux. I could probably deal with these either by virtual-machine Windows or by a separate Windows machine shared by multiple users. (Don’t laugh — that’s what our copy editors did for awhile, since they’re all on Macs and some initially wanted access to an ActiveX-control feature in our content management system.)

Other business users — workers in sales, finance or human resources, for instance — might also find that applications they depend on don’t translate easily to Linux. They may find work-arounds; they may not.

While I liked many things about my Linux desktop (look and feel, elegant command-line implementations, robust open-source apps, the whole open-source concept), I found the lack of some key applications and the occasional hardware non-plug-and-play too limiting. Unlike Scot Finnie on Mac OS X, I’m not willing to tell Microsoft buh-bye. Not yet, anyway. But there’s enough here I like that I’m going to keep the Linux system set up, too.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Open Source

Enterprise Apps Header Red Hat Plans Linux Desktop Offering 'for the Masses'

March 20, 2007 Leave a comment

Speaking of Linux on the Desktop, it looks like Red Hat is getting back into the Desktop Linux market. From the article:

Red Hat is planning a packaged Linux desktop solution that it hopes will push its Linux desktop offering to a far broader audience than exists for its current client solution.

“This will be a more comprehensive offering that will target markets like the small and medium-sized business [SMB] sector and emerging markets. Part of this strategy is to get the desktop more to the masses than our existing client is getting today. So there will be a different packaged solution for the masses coming down the pike,” he said.

Asked if part of the strategy is the mass consumer market, Cornier responded that Red Had has “no plans to go and sell this offering at Best Buy, if that’s what you mean by the mass consumer market. Customers will be able to download it and get a Red Hat Network subscription on the Web for it, which is what we feel is the distribution wave of the future anyway,” he said.

I’ve always thought Red Hat was missing an important part of the market by not offering a maintenance but no support option. That’s basically what RHL was. For my part, I still maintain that Fedora is not a viable option for the average Linux user. If you’re a developer it’s not bad (in fact I use it on both my main home desktop and my main work desktop), but the initial roll out was poor, the packaging paradigm keeps changing (I don’t mean at the RPM level, but at the Core+Extras flips that go on every couple version), the upgrades often break things and with Fedora Legacy gone the upgrade cycle is too fast for a non-enthusiast. I don’t mean this to mean that the project isn’t doing some absolutely awesome things as they are, it’s just that I think people try to do with Fedora things they shouldn’t (mainly, act like it’s RHL). If you can believe it, RH9 is still one of the most downloaded distro’s at LQ ISO. To me, that speaks volumes. The article was a bit light on details but I am looking forward to seeing what the product actually entails.

On the desktop note, I’ve really been meaning to try SLED and have heard some great things about it (although the patent deal did put my off a bit on installing it to be honest). I just haven’t had the chance though. Hopefully soon. They announced the SP1 beta at Brainshare, so now is as good a time as any. They also released this “Mac Guy” spoof, which is superbly done. On the distribution front, after hanging out with Jono a bit at SCALE I finally installed Ubuntu for the first time (on my laptop). Not bad at all and I’m interested to see how it survives a little use and an upgrade or two. The amount of quality choice we have in the Linux market today is truly phenomenal.

–jeremy

Filed under Fedora, Linux, Novell, Open Source, Red Hat, Ubuntu

Connected diversity

March 20, 2007 Leave a comment

Jono made a somewhat subtle, but really important, observation at CeBit:

What was particularly interesting was how Ubuntu, and as such Linux and free software, is becoming part and parcel of peoples lives. If anyone walked past the booth, we would grab them and pester them about Ubuntu, and a huge number of people who walked past seemingly paying no interest were already using Ubuntu. Most of these people were simply not all that excited about it – it is the OS they use, and that was the end of it. This shows that Ubuntu is becoming a real Operating System – people are using it and not automatically becoming all-singing-all-dancing community Linux fans. It is becoming a norm and part of the furniture and this is good news. Of course, it would be great if they all did become community members, but the reality is that a percentage of the user base will become contributors, and to see so many using it in regular end-user scenarios is extremely encouraging.

I’ve been noticing this also, and it’s more of an indication to me about the mass adoption of Linux than any eWeek article or analysts report ever will be. When 100% of your users are hard core evangelists, you may have a great product but you certainly haven’t reached a certain scale. People just using Linux is an indication to me that things really are ready now. No, I’m not saying this will be the year of the Linux desktop but it’s clear that a couple of things that have needed to come together for a while now finally are. Interesting times indeed!

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Open Source, Ubuntu

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