Sun Releases First GPLed Java Source

December 26, 2006 Leave a comment

A quick (belated) follow up to a story I previously covered. Sun has now officially released part of Java under the GPL. phoneME, which has previously been called J2ME, is now available for download with a GPLv2 license. The supported platforms are Linux/ARM, Linux/x86 and Windows/i386. Many seemed to guess that J2SE would be released first, but I'm sure that's coming soon. Once again kudos to Sun for making the decision they did.
–jeremy
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Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source, Sun

Red Hat CEO on Microsoft, Novell customers

December 26, 2006 Leave a comment

The Red Hat stock continues to increase (RHT up almost 30% on the month), mostly as a result of beating Wall Street expectations last week. During the earnings call with analysts, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik was asked about Microsoft's announcement of three joint customers with Novell this week. His response:
“Those were existing accounts and there is at least one of them that I can speak definitely that is also a Red Hat account,” Szulik said. “So those were older engagements and we were not involved in competitive situations with those two or three years ago when they became Novell accounts.”
The existing Red Hat account would presumably be Credit Suisse. And one of the existing Novell customers is Deutsche Bank, whose chief technology officer, Clemens Jochum, said in the joint news release that the Microsoft-Novell deal “gives us the benefit of choice of platforms and tremendous flexibility that will help make our company more competitive and efficient.”
On that subject, the VAR Guy blog pointed out this week (see Dec. 20 post) that Deutsche Bank, “was an early investor in SuSE Linux, so it's hardly surprising that the firm's IT team now praises the Novell-Microsoft deal.”
An interesting perspective on the announcement, which I covered here. It should also be noted that Deutsche Bank was also subpoenaed by IBM in the SCO case. Google for more details, but while not directly related to this, it could give you some insight into their general mindset. I'm a bit intrigued into how 2007 will treat both NOVL and RHT.
–jeremy
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Filed under Linux, Main Page, Novell, Open Source, Red Hat

Novell Linux Certificates

December 22, 2006 Leave a comment

One of the parts of the Novell/Microsoft deal that hasn't been getting much press is the 70,000 SLES certificates that Microsoft purchased for distribution. I was a bit surprised to see that 16,000 of them have already been doled out. Three major companies have even gone on the record about their involvement: AIG, Credit Suisse, and Deutsche Bank. From the article:
Two banks and an insurance company have accepted Microsoft's offer of technical support for Novell Inc.'s Suse Enterprise Linux.
One of the three, Credit Suisse Group, does not yet use Suse Linux, spokeswomen for the two software vendors said.
As part of its marketing support for Suse Linux, Microsoft agreed to distribute “subscription certificates,” each one entitling customers to technical support from Novell for a server running Suse Enterprise Linux. Microsoft intends to distribute around 70,000 of the certificates a year for the next five years. Customers have already activated 16,000 of the certificates in the seven weeks they have been offered, Microsoft said.
The companies declined to put a price on the certificates, but Microsoft's general manager for customer advocacy and licensing, Susan Hauser, warned: “Don't assume that we're giving them away.”
It still strikes me as odd to have your main competitor sell your product, especially when that competitor is Microsoft. There's some interesting discussion about this going on at Matt Asay's blog. A snippet:
Again, one problem I have with this announcement is that each of these companies was already using both company's products prior to this announcement and the pact. They're not net new customers of either Microsoft or Novell, making the announcement as such somewhat deceptive. Fine. It's marketing.
But it also overlooks the fact that some – perhaps all? – of these companies are also heavy Red Hat users. Hence, the real question whether this early adopter program with Novell/Microsoft will actually pull them away from Red Hat. Early signs are a clear “No,” even despite the dramatically lower prices Novell is offering for its pilot program. It's tough to beat free. ;-)
All that said, I still think it's good that customers are buying into the interoperability story. This part of the Microsoft/Novell deal is useful and important. I buy it.
It's unclear in the announcement whether the patent bit of the agreement had anything to do with any of the companies decisions. That would be an interesting question to get the answer to, although I'm not going to hold my breath. This story continues to get more interesting from my perspective. And I said I wouldn't blog about it any more ;)
–jeremy
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Filed under Linux, Main Page, Microsoft, Novell, Open Source, Red Hat

Novell: Hubert Mantel Returns, Jeremy Allison Resigns

December 22, 2006 Leave a comment

Quite a bit going on at Novell over the last couple days. We have Hubert Mantel returning and Jeremy Allison resigning. For those that don't remember, Hubert is one of the Suse founders and had resigned from Novell a little over a year ago, saying: “”Too late for me. I just decided to leave Suse/Novell, this is no longer the company I founded 13 years ago.” Jeremy, who is a core Samba guy, joined Novell a bit over a year ago and resigned over the recent Microsoft Patent agreement, saying:
I know you don't want to hear this, I know *nobody* wants to hear this but I'll not be able to live with this if I don't say it publicly at least once.
Whilst the Microsoft patent agreement is in place there is *nothing* we can do to fix community relations. And I really mean nothing.
We can pledge patents all we wish, we can talk to the press and “community leaders”, we can do all the right things w.r.t. all our other interactions, but we will still be known as GPL violators and that's the end of it.
For people who will point out to me we don't “technically” violate the GPLv2 here's an argument I recently made on the mailing lists.
“Do you think that if we'd have found what we legally considered a clever way around the Microsoft EULA so we didn't have to pay for Microsoft licenses and had decided to ship, oh let's say, “Exchange Server” under this “legal hack” that Microsoft would be silent about it – or we should act aggr[i]eved when they change the EULA to stop us doing this?”
The Microsoft patent agreement has put us outside the community, and there is no positive aspect to that fact, and no way to make it so. Until the patent provision is revoked, we are pariahs.
When asked about that deal, Mantel said:
6. What do you think about the Microsoft/Novell deal?
I think it is a good thing especially for the users. If you think some years back, Linux was not taken seriously. Now even Microsoft acknowledges that it exists and will not go away. I understand that many people don't like it as Novell is collaborating with the “evil empire”. But I don't like this way of thinking; we are not working against somebody, but we are working FOR Linux. Fundamentalism always leads to pain. What's important is that Linux is free and will remain to be free. The source code is open to everybody, this is what counts for me. Some people seem to be torn in an interesting way: On one hand they want “world domination”, at the same time they don't like the feeling that Linux has grown up and needs to deal with the real business world out there. We have a saying here in Germany that goes along the lines of “wash me, but do not make me wet”. If you want Linux to succeed, you cannot live in your own separate universe.
One thing is clear, a rift is definitely forming on this issue. Was that one of the goals of the agreement from the Microsoft side? Some are speculating that, but I'm still unsure what the motives were. It took Jeremy about 30 seconds to find a job as he seems to have landed at Google. Regardless of what you think of the patent agreement, you have to applaud Jeremy for sticking up for what he believes in. He put his money where his mouth is and gave up a job he clearly enjoyed because of it. You have to respect that kind of conviction. It will be interesting to see what direction Novell heads in over the next 6 months or so. Meanwhile RHT seems completely unaffected by this or the recent Oracle news. Today they beat analysts expectations handily and the stock jumped over 25%.
–jeremy
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Filed under Linux, Main Page, Microsoft, Novell, Open Source, Oracle, Red Hat

Has the Desktop Linux Bubble Burst?

December 22, 2006 Leave a comment

That's the question posed by this article. To be honest, I don't think there ever was a “Desktop Linux Bubble” to burst. The Linux “Desktop” continues to be an interesting thing to me. What I mean by that is, there's a dichotomy that I don't think is going away soon. On the one hand, I find the Linux desktop much easier to use and more stable than any version of Windows I have ever used. Even in XP you have to reboot to install something like a scanner (I'd not have believed that, except I just walked someone through it). While some people seem to maintain that the way things are done is XP is easier, I think they are confusing ease with familiarity. Things in Linux are typically much more logical (or maybe they just make more sense to me). On the other hand, the Linux desktop has a huge number of deficiencies. The lack of audio and video support out of the box (and as I have said before, if your answer is that all these items are in some off-shore repo, please put your hand down). There's also a general lack of what I'll call integration. Because we have such a large variety of frameworks and apps, too often they just don't work well together. This is something Apple does extremely well. This is also something the Portland Project is attempting to address, but realistically how long do you think it well be before real strides are made? Probably 2008-2009. That doesn't mean we're not making progress though. Not too long ago audio was a complicated mess in Linux. You had ESD, arts, jackd, ALSA, OSS-emulation – it was a nightmare. With the addition of the dmix plugin most of that complexity is now hidden. I haven't had an audio issue that I can think of in a while. That's real and demonstrable progress.
Now, some people seem to think the answer is for Gnome and KDE to join forces or merge. I'm not heavily into either community, but that seems really unlikely. They have fundamentally different visions and are built using completely different toolsets. A merge would basically mean throwing away everything and starting 100% from scratch. Something like Portland that allows any number of Desktop Environments to conform to a known API seems much more likely to succeed (and more more in the spirit of Linux in general). In the end, I guess I still don't understand why Linux on the Desktop is such a debated topic. Linux is an absolutely remarkable Operating System. Even more, it's an amazing testament to what can be accomplished. It's not all things to all people, and it never will be. The desktop may be a ways off realistically, but sometimes you just have to sit back, relax and enjoy the ride. We have an OS here that scales from mobile phones to mainframes. We have an OS that despite its success still has a community that continues to make decisions based on technical merit and not marketing. That means the sky quite literally is the limit. We'll get there – be patient.
–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

Software installation on Linux

December 19, 2006 Leave a comment

Ian Murdock has an interesting series of posts going on his blog about the current state of software installation on Linux. A few snippets:
After reading through the comments to part 1, let me first point out that our goal is to create a vibrant third party software ecosystem around Linux—you know, like the one Microsoft has built around Windows. No, it’s not about imitating Microsoft. It’s about being competitive. A platform is only as good as the applications that run on it.
Bottom line: Many third parties have built their businesses around proprietary software, and we can’t just ignore them. And “ecosystem” implies decentralized, which I argued in part 1 was a key tenet of open source development anyway, i.e., this should be playing to one of our core strengths. So, if your “solution” is to tell ISVs (independent software vendors) to give us their source code so the distributions can include it because that’s just how we do things, you can safely skip the rest of the post below. You’re simply not going to agree that any of this is a problem.
Ok. Assuming our goal is to create a vibrant third party software ecosystem (and everyone still reading agrees that’s a good goal, right?), we have the following challenges.
First off, we have to understand what ISVs want. The answer is simple: ISVs want to treat Linux as a single platform, which means they want to offer a single package for Linux, much as they do for Windows. So, if one commenter is right that “[t]he problem is that people (including software distributors) believe there’s such [a] thing as ‘Linux’ as a target platform” and that “[i]f you’re distributing software for ‘Linux’ then it won’t be simple to install it, ever”, well, then Linux is destined to suffer the fate of UNIX. I’m not ready to give up so easily.
I agree with much of what Ian says (both what's included in the above blurb and what's not). All too often people have the attitude that if a company wants to have anything to do with Linux they have to do things 100% like an Open Source company. That's an OK attitude to have, but it's not overly realistic and it will relegate Linux to the fringe forever. That's not something I'd like to see happen. ISV's do want a single platform to deploy and certify on, but that's something that almost all Linux people seem to be against. The LSB tries to address the issue while still allowing Linux to be Linux, but I'm still not 100% convinced it will solve all the problems. It is a good start though, and with some work I think it could evolve into a workable solution to the problem (or at least be a piece of that solution). Ian definitely hits it on the head when he says that we have to solve this problem in an evolutionary manner. Companies have way too much invested in the current setups and a from scratch solution just isn't viable. The FSG is launching a Packaging workgroup to continue the discussion and it's an issue I plan on following. This is something that will have a monumental impact on the adoption of Linux, especially on the desktop. For the majority of users it's all about the apps, and getting those apps installed is step number one. This issue certainly touches on one that I've continually mentioned on this blog. What are we willing to give up to gain mainstream adoption? In this particular case, I think we need to let out some slack and bend a bit.
–jeremy
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Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

Interviewed by Packt Publishing

December 17, 2006 2 Comments

Mayank Sharma has just posted an interview he did with me for Packt Publishing. From the interview:
When I first ran my Linux distribution almost a decade ago, there weren't many places I could turn to for help. Whatever mailing list you tuned into, everybody seemed to be concerned with improving the Linux kernel or some other gibberish task. If ever, my newbie queries always returned back with a single word — RTFM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM). That's until Jeremy Garcia fresh into his first full-time Linux job, decided to give something back to the community. His website, LinuxQuestions.org, soon became the one-stop source for all Linux-related user queries.
In all these years I am yet to come across a single Linux user that hasn't, at one point or the other, benefited from LinuxQuestions. For the statistically inclined, LinuxQuestions's two hundred thousand registered members had posted over 2 million posts as per stats available in December last year!
In this interview, the site's founder, Jeremy Garcia, discusses how LinuxQuestions.org has out grown its forum board-only image and spawned a hardware compatibility list, a wiki, a social bookmarking site, and a podcast.
Thanks for the kind words Mayank. It's always great to see when others think LQ is adding real value to the community. That's what it's all about.
–jeremy
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Filed under Linux, LinuxQuestions.org, Main Page, Open Source

10 who matter in Open Source

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
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Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

MySQL Quietly Drops Support For Debian Linux II

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
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All Expenses Paid Press Junket from Microsoft… to Rob Limo

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
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Filed under Linux, Main Page, Microsoft, Open Source

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