MySQL Quietly Drops Support For Debian Linux

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
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Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

Microsoft wins industry standard status for Office

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
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Filed under Main Page, Microsoft, Open Source

U.S. Refuses to Hand Over Fighter Source Code to UK

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

Filed under Main Page, Open Source

It Takes a 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
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Filed under Linux, Main Page, Microsoft, Open Source

An Upgrade Infrastructure at LQ

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
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Filed under Linux, LinuxQuestions.org, Main Page, Open Source

Stallman Comments on Legality of Microsoft Novell Patent Agreement

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

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

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