Wikipedia changes its license

June 2, 2009 Leave a comment

(via David A. Wheeler) The proposed change that the copyright licensing terms on the wikis operated by the WMF – including Wikipedia, be changed to include the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) license in addition to the current GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) has been approved. From the official results:

If “no opinion” votes are not included, the Yes/No percentage becomes 87.9%/12.1% (15071 votes).

This impacts us at LQ due to its implications to the LQ Wiki. We recognized the desire to license content CC-BY-SA some time ago and added that as an additional option as a result. With this Wikipedia change it’s likely we’ll do the research needed to offer the same dual licensing option that the WMF now offers. Stay tuned.

–jeremy

Filed under FSF, LinuxQuestions.org, Open Formats, Open Source, Open Standards

The fight over Open Source 'leeches'

June 2, 2009 2 Comments

Open Source “leeches” seems to be getting a lot of press lately, and this article is just one example:

Open source is supposed to be all about community, but as commercial open source becomes the norm, fewer developers are giving back. Is that hurting open source?

Your ear doesn’t have to be pressed to the ground for long to hear angry grumblings in the open source community about leeches, vampires, or freeloaders.

“The future of Eclipse is in danger,” Michael Scharf, a member of the Eclipse Foundation’s architecture council, said in an angry April blog post. “The problem is that there is no real pressure for companies to contribute back to the community and it is easy to use the Eclipse ‘for free’ for their own products. The Eclipse community should create peer pressure to prevent the freeloaders and parasites from getting away without punishment,” he wrote.

Scharf likens the lack of contributions back to the community to the “tragedy of the commons,” in which greedy individuals unthinkingly destroy a shared resource. And in an e-mail exchange, he put it this way: “The general mentality of the industry frustrates me; the attitude to take advantage of something like open source and not give back anything to the system.”

I see a couple issues with this mindset. First, a project initially has the right to pick any license they like. Later complaining that people who are following that license aren’t giving back seems a little disingenuous. If you want mandatory contributions, pick a license that requires that (keep in mind that as a result it will almost certainly not be Open Source software). Note that the issue is being confounded by the fact that some companies are violating licenses and therefore are leeches that need to be dealt with appropriately. Be careful not to confuse these two groups, they should be treated very differently. It should also be noted that a specific individual or group using but not contributing to a particular project does not really “destroy a shared resource”. Since that additional usage doesn’t deplete a finite resource, I’m not sure the tragedy of the commons really comes into play here.

Secondly, all too often I see “giving code” and “contributing” as seen as synonymous. There are many ways that some corporations contribute without code being involved in any way. There are the obvious cases such as documentation or having employees participate in support forums such as LQ. There are others that are little more subtle though. Employing people who tout their Open Source skills creates an ecosystem that creates further demand for a project and for Open Source. The more demand for a project there is, the more likely there will be demand for that projects commercial services or products.

There are many other ways to contribute to a project. From inadvertent promotion which helps create mindshare and awareness to finding bugs which helps create better software, I think we need to expand our definition of contribution in many ways. For many projects, having a large number of “non-contributing” users is what made the project itself interesting in the first place.

Look, I’m not saying that some companies aren’t leeches, they are. I’m also not saying that as a community we don’t need to find better ways to foster more and better contributions, because we do. The shift from purely idealogical almost dogmatic Open Source to a more commercial Open Source seems inexorable at this point though, and working through these issues in a pragmatic way should be seen as in the best interest of all parties. While we have to be extremely careful to preserve the ideals and beliefs that got us here and that make Open Source what it is, we also have to be cognizant that change isn’t always bad.

–jeremy

Filed under Open Source

Oracle Sun Acquisition Musings

May 21, 2009 Leave a comment

A little time has past since the announcement that Oracle would acquire Sun. While there are still many unanswered questions, I thought I’d post a quick update on the topic.

The first topic I’ll cover is the Sun hardware business. From a recent interview with Larry (via Ostatic):

“No, we are definitely not going to exit the hardware business. While most hardware businesses are low-margin, companies like Apple and Cisco enjoy very high-margins because they do a good job of designing their hardware and software to work together. If a company designs both hardware and software, it can build much better systems than if they only design the software. That’s why Apple’s iPhone is so much better than Microsoft phones.”

Ellison also confirms in the interview that far from discontinuing the SPARC chip, he intends to increase investment in it. “We think designing our own chips is very, very important,” he said. He also notes that Sun outsources almost all of its manufacturing to companies such as Fujitsu.

So it looks like Oracle will indeed be pursuing the “entire stack” path that many predicted. One major benefit to Oracle here is that if a customer is getting both their hardware and software (including both the OS and applications) from the same company, it makes switching away from that company extremely costly and complicated.

That brings us to the OS. It’s still not clear to me which way Oracle is going to go here. Long term I can’t see Solaris and Linux being first class citizens within Oracle. Which one they choose remains to be seen. They “own” Solaris in a way they could never “own” Linux, which may be the deciding factor for a company like Oracle. That being said, I’d imagine more of their customers want Linux so it’s certainly not going to be an easy decision. Some are speculating (via Matt) that if Oracle does go with Solaris that a company like IBM may acquire Red Hat. I’m not so sure about that, but it is a possibility. While IBM does really like Linux, Jboss would be a major duplication for IBM (and it represents a lot of the growth potential within Red Hat).

Finally, here’s a recent announcement regarding MySQL:

The following was in the just released monthly bug report for the Falcon storage engine:

“With the news that Sun has aggreed to be purchaced by Oracle, Some inevitable changes will occur. Once the acquisition is made, the need for Falcon as a MySQL storage engine will be re-evaluated. Until then, Falcon will continue to improve stability and performance. The team will also evaluate other technical niches that may be unique to Falcon.”

I for one would be very disappointed to see Falcon not supported by Oracle. I know they have worked very hard to create a next-generation storage engine. While it could be argued that InnoDB can fill all use cases, I believe that choices are a good thing and having one less choice is not a good thing.

Good luck all on the team. You have been nothing but kind and generous when answering my dumb questions via email and in person. You can count my vote for “keep it!!”.

I think it’s clear that this acquisition will mean some significant changes for the future path of MySQL. The fact that a lot of upcoming MySQL-related innovation may come from outside the company, and from places like the Open Database Alliance should at least ensure that MySQL remains viable from a technology standpoint.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Open Source, Oracle, Sun

LQ Social Networking Update

May 11, 2009 Leave a comment

While LQ has been on the various social networks since the beginning, we’re finally starting to use them all regularly. If you’re not already following LQ, here are the relevant links.

Twitter: @linuxquestions
identi.ca: @linuxquestions
Facebook: @linuxquestions

We should have a Facebook app coming soon. If there’s something specific you’d like to see, let us know.

–jeremy

Filed under LinuxQuestions.org

Oracle Agrees to Acquire Sun Microsystems

April 20, 2009 1 Comment

With rumors of an IBM acquisition still swirling, early this morning Oracle announced that it is acquiring Sun for roughly $7.4 billion. From a CNET article:

Oracle and Sun announced Monday that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. That puts the value of the transaction at about $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt.

Oracle President Safra Catz said in a statement:

We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle’s earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle’s non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined.

To me, IBM seems like a better fit for Sun and this acquisition leaves as many questions as answers. While Oracle recently announced a hardware product line in a partnership with HP, do they really want to be in the hardware business themselves? A few years ago Larry Ellison definitively said they did not want to be in that business. With much of Sun’s revenue coming from hardware, will they spin that division off or use it to focus more on a complete Oracle stack, that includes everything from hardware to database. Moving to the individual parts of that stack, will Oracle continue with the Sparc CPU line or be interested in the more commodity x86 lines. At the OS level, will Oracle continue to focus on Linux and their Unbreakable implementation or will they attempt to keep Solaris alive. Oracle has been contributing to Linux in a significant way recently, and it would be a huge loss for that to go away IMHO. At the recent Linux Foundation summit Oracle touted that it views it’s upcoming btrfs filesystem as superior to ZFS. What does the future hold for projects such as that?

That brings us to MySQL. I’d contend that MySQL is “worth” more to Oracle than it is to any other company (including IBM) and here’s why. To most other companies, MySQL is roughly worth the net present value of future projected MySQL revenue. The thing most people don’t understand about the MySQL/Oracle relationship is that for many small to medium commercial projects, MySQL is “good enough” and has a much lower TCO than Oracle. Even so, many companies didn’t actually want to go with MySQL for a variety of reasons (many political and procurement related). This created a situation where the *option* of MySQL effectively capped the price people would spend on low end Oracle projects. It wasn’t just the number of people actually leaving Oracle for MySQL, it was the number threatening to and getting additional (and sometimes steep) discounts on Oracle as a result. This creates a premium to Oracle that no other company would have been able to extract. What this acquisition means for the long term future of MySQL within Sun is unclear to me. Oracle has owned InnoDB for a long time. This could either be a long overdue reunion of Inno and MySQL, or the beginning of a slow death for MySQL. One where Oracle doesn’t overtly kill the project, but deprecates any features it sees as threating to its main cash cow and relegates MySQL to a web-only type product. On a related note, the acquisition almost certainly means the end of Postgres support within Sun.

It seems one piece that will certainly benefit from the acquisition is Java, although I’d imagine that IBM is not too happy that Oracle now “owns” Java. Eclipse might have to change it’s name now ;) Also, the rivalry between Larry and Bill Gates is well known. Does this mean that Oracle will be interested in funding addition OpenOffice.org development even thought it’s *way* outside their normal target market?

In the end, Oracle is one of the best acquisition machines on the plant. They have been purchasing and integrating companies for a long time. They’ve become very good at it. However, most of the companies they have acquired have been very specific targets in niche markets that aimed to fill a perceived gap in Oracle’s offerings. Sun is not that. They are a huge company with a massive product line that spans hardware and software. This is not the average Oracle acquisition and the decisions Oracle makes will have massive implications not just for Open Source but for the entire IT industry.

–jeremy

(Note: Interestingly, the Oracle press site has been down with a “Server is too busy to handle request” for the last 30 minutes. I’ll update the first link in this post as soon as it’s back up. Until then, here’s a NYT article.)

[Updated] Additional links:

Glyn Moody
Matt Asay
Larry Augustin

Filed under Linux, Oracle, Sun

Roundtable Discussion: Why Can't We All Just Get Along (Liveblog)

April 8, 2009 Leave a comment

Panelists:
Jim Zemlin – Linux Foundation
Ian Murdock – Sun
Sam Ramji – Microsoft

* Lessons learned after being at MSFT for a couple years as the “Open Source” guy
– Sam: When he came in from BEA, things working together “just made sense” to him. Day 1 he would have explained what he was doing a bit better to the legal team. Engineers tend to change much quicker than lawyers, whose job is to mitigate risk.
* Similar question to Ian:
– Was a bit of a culture shock going to Sun. He was used to working at 50+ person companies that he had started. Thinks he may have been a bit naive when first going into Sun. “Large companies have more inertia than you might think”.

* It’s clear that Microsoft sees the computing landscape changing. What can the Open Source crowds do to help the agents of change within the company?
– Sam: We’re a large company and some parts are changing faster than others. Identifying that there is a place to go with the things you think are not going well is important. He’d like to be seen as the unelected representative within Microsoft for us. He might not have an immediate answer, but he wants to better understand the problems.

* Why does he (Sam) care what the Open Source and Linux communities think?
Sam the person: “I think computing just needs to get better”
Sam the MSFT representative: We’re at a point in our history that we need to understand what the next engine of growth is going to be.

* What is Sun going to do with MySQL?
– Ian: We’ve fully committed to the Open Source model. MySQL represents a huge opportunity. The kinds of software you see being used in Web 2.0 and cloud computing represent a new dynamic. Sun’s global sales force plus products like MySQL are where Sun will grow.

* Where is Microsoft going next?
– Sam: We want to build software that is in demand on every platform. He sees 4 general directions for this: server, client, mobile and cloud.

* Sam: “When you hear the same thing from enough customers, you listen…even if you don’t necessarily agree”. Gave the example of Microsoft supporting PHP, despite having put a lot of resources toward and really liking ASP.NET.

* We’re clearly disappointed about Software Patents in this community. The recent FAT lawsuit included.
– Sam: We agree there are issues, but don’t think the whole system should just be thrown out. Says Microsoft suffers more than anyone else in the current system. Spends over $100M a year defending against patent suits. Did not address FAT lawsuit specifically.
Ian: It’s a bit of an arms race and large companies feel the need to amass patents for defensive reasons. No one wants to be the first to drop all their patents.

* Ian: With cloud computing, are we losing many of the advantages of Open Source?
– Jim: I don’t think the operating system discussion is going to be decided for a while.
– Sam: Now the “cloud” is just elastic computing. The next cloud with be more like Google App Engine or Microsoft Azure. The idioms and structures are different… it’s a whole different environment.
(Note: I don’t think they fully understood the question Ian was asking, but it’s a really important question…and one I’ll be thinking about quite a bit moving forward. It’s not always just about access to the code. It’s about the code being usable outside the original context, portability and other related issues)

* Question from Jeremy Allison: Asserting patent rights is fundamentally against the Open Source ethos. FAT lawsuit aside, Jeremy would simply like clarity around what interoperability IS possible and what interoperability (from a legal perspective) IS NOT possible.
– Sam: We learned a lot from the work MSFT did with Samba on licensing protocols, but it won’t scale to 1,000 of protocols. “We can and must do more about predictability on where we’re going”. Places where we currently have a licensing program are probably good places for Open Source to stay away from, at least in the near future. “We need to improve here”. The SMB/CIFS agreement went through 35 iterations in 6 weeks. We’re willing to learn.

The final consensus: where we can be more clear with each other, let’s do it. Linux, Microsoft and Sun are all going to be around for the long haul. We’re all going to be here, let’s make the best of it. Let’s move beyond ideology and be pragmatic.

That’s the end of the Summit for today. See you at the Exploratorium for the evening reception.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Sun

Linux in the Enterprise: The Journey, Milestones and What's Ahead (Liveblog)

April 8, 2009 Leave a comment

Edward Screven – Chief Corporate Architect at Oracle.

* In the late 90’s they were looking for an OS to recommend to their clients. They immediately ruled out Windows for a variety of reasons, both technical and political/personal. It came down to BSD and Linux. They went with Linux. “While it looks like an obvious choice now, at the time it was not”.
* 1998 was the first commercial database port for Linux. 2001 was the first 64-bit port for Linux.
* “We will run our whole business on Linux” – Larry Ellison in 2002. They now do.
* They spend about $3B a year on R&D. Most of it is done on Linux.
* “In retrospect, we are VERY happy with our choice to use Linux”.
* Oracle has 42,000 Linux servers and 10’s of Petabytes on Linux.
* Side note: LQ uses OCFS2 and I have been quite happy with it.
* Big on Virtualization. Oracle VM is based on Xen. It’s main goal is manageability.
* They would like to help make Linux the “default data center operating system” with “NO questions asked”. They see this manifesting itself in a fungible “Linux Grid Infrastructure”.
* Oracle likes btrfs better than zfs.
* “We make more money with Linux than ANY pure ‘Linux’ company”.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Linux Foundation, Oracle

Panel: Measuring Community Contributions (Liveblog)

April 8, 2009 Leave a comment

Panelists:
Joe Brockmeier – OpenSUSE
Jono Bacon – Ubuntu
James Bottomley – Novell
Dan Frye – IBM
Karsten Wade – Fedora

* Don’t always associated “contribution” with “code”.
* People tend to contribute things that are of value to them – they are scratching their own itch.
* Measuring community is very new and is not an exact science. There’s still a lot to learn and we’re still making mistakes.
* Having a clear answer to “how do I get involved” is very important.
* The first mistake companies often make when they try to enter the Linux community is an attempt to push things upstream as-is and in a way that only benefit the company.
* Audience question: It seems most mainline kernel development comes from the developed world. Why isn’t more coming from India, China and other developing countries?
– Dan indicated that some IBM’ers are actually effectively contributing from BRIC countries, but admits that we can do a much better job here.
– Some of this is an infrastructure problem, which is already being worked on.
* Audience question: Is there a way to objectively measure contribution?
– Intuition is our starting point, but we’re moving toward reverse intuition.
– Fedora is using EKG – https://fedorahosted.org/ekg/
– Every project focuses on different aspects and different items are important to them.
– Measuring community started out very informally, but as we mature we’re being much more rigorous and scientific in our measurements.
– Deciding _what_ to measure can be difficult.
– Measuring for the sake of measuring is senseless. Getting data that is useful is very important.
Audience question: is anyone measuring the way people are mentoring?
– Generally yes, but it’s vastly different for each project/community.

–jeremy

Filed under community, Fedora, IBM, Linux, Linux Foundation, Novell, Ubuntu

Panel: The Linux Kernel – What's Next (Liveblog)

April 8, 2009 Leave a comment

Panelists:
Ted T’so – CTO Linux Foundation
Greg Kroah-Hartman – Novell
Andrew Morton – Google
Keith Packard – X.org

* 2.6.30
– now has a staging tree
* X.org
– moving forward, focus will be on fixing what is already there.
– Intel stuff mostly “just works”. Lot of work going into ATi Radeon right now. nVidia is still not supporting native Linux efforts “at all”. Via is starting to engage the Linux community.
– each driver is a fairly concerted effort. There is a lot of silicon, complexity and logic in GPU’s these days.
– with most graphic stuff now in kernel, it’s easier to get started with small new experimental interesting projects.
* Filesystems
– ext4 – 2 community distros will ship in the near future with ext4 enabled. Fedora 11 may make it the default.
– most recent bugs have not involved data loss.
– ext4 really represents a short term safe solution, but is based on old technology. Long term there will be a different answer.
– btrfs and nilfs are two of those.
– Are there too many filesystems?
* Linux Next
– comprised of over 100 branches
– has taken a lot of work out of doing -mm. He’d like to see it get more uptake, but think it’s still been a success overall.
* Is there a point where the Linux kernel community gets too big?
– the velocity of change remains astounding.
– there have been a lot of new “silos” and even subsystems that have popped up that have not been vetted by any of the old timers. This can cause issues.
* Audience question: There is a big push to get things in mainline, but often when someone actually tries to do that they run into a lot of opposition. How can this be improved?
– touch the kernel core as little as possible (systemtap was used as an example) and if you do, the code better be *very* good. If it’s a new driver or small subsystem, send it to Greg for Linux Next.
– utrace ran into the chicken and egg problem. Not enough users to get merged, but difficult to get users before you are in mainline.
– Knowing how to push a patch to the kernel community makes a big difference.
* Where do we stand with tracing?
– part of the problem will be evangelizing that tracers exist in the kernel.
– there is a large amount of interest in tracing now. A lot of what is going on now is experimentation and we’re still learning. Documentation is still poor, but they continue to get more usable.
* Audience question: What is being done to foster the next generation of kernel maintainers?
– Is actually something some of the current core maintainers think about. Being welcome, open and honest is a lot of it.
– The code is complex and growing rapidly. Just getting to know the memory system well could take 6-12 months. It’s a serious time commitment,
* nftables
– what would a migration from iptables look like? A long process that would take 4+ years and would require serious vendor buyin. It has been done before.
– maintaining compatibility with the `iptables` command could help.
– in almost all cases, maintaining backward compatibility is a lot of work.
* A lot of new companies who never contributed to the Linux kernel are now doing so.
* There are now 1,200 contributors and the mix of sources is extremely varied.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Linux Foundation, Open Source

Linux Foundation to Host Moblin (Liveblog)

April 8, 2009 Leave a comment

Imad Sousou, Director of the Open Source Technology Center at Intel, explains the decision to have the Linux Foundation host the Moblin project.

* “Big corporations are not good shepherds of Open Source”
* “The Linux Foundation provides a vendor neutral forum where the project and its developer community can thrive”
* Despite giving up control, Intel will actually be dedicating more resources to Moblin moving forward, not less.
* There will be no disruption to the Moblin project
* Moblin was created because Intel want every OS to run the best on Intel platforms. The Atom processor was the impetus.
* What’s ahead in Moblin 2
– Fastboot:
today: 5 secs
goal: 2 secs
– Next generation UI’s
widget toolkits are not the right answer.
animation frameworks might be. Intel likes “Clutter”, which “allows you to develop apps using gaming technology”.
– Connection management using Connman

Filed under Intel, Linux, Linux Foundation

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