Opening up Symbian – Good or Bad for Linux?

June 30, 2008 Leave a comment

That’s the question raised by this recent Nokia press release:

Espoo, Finland – Nokia today announced it has launched a cash offer to acquire all of the shares of Symbian Limited that Nokia does not already own, at a price of EUR 3.647 per share. The net cash outlay from Nokia to purchase the approximately 52% of Symbian Limited shares it does not already own will be approximately EUR 264 million.

The acquisition is a fundamental step in the establishment of the Symbian Foundation, announced today by Nokia, together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Motorola, NTT DOCOMO, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone. More information about the planned foundation can be found at http://www.symbianfoundation.org.

From the Symbian Foundation site:

The Symbian Foundation platform will be available to members under a royalty-free license from this non-profit foundation. The Symbian Foundation will provide, manage and unify the platform for its members. Also, it will commit to moving the platform to open source during the next two years, with the intent to use the Eclipse Public License. This will make the platform code available to all for free, bringing additional innovation to the platform and engaging even a broader community in future developments.

Keep in mind that while not a huge success in the US, Symbian does still account for about 60% of all smartphones, with the next OS a distant second at about 15%. So, what does this mean for mobile Linux? It’s still unclear to me the direction Nokia will take, so it’s hard to tell. They are all over the place at the moment. The have the GTK based maemo project, have recently acquired TrollTech for QT and now have an Open Source Symbian. Long term, they can’t possibly want to support all three of these. Looking at Symbian specifically, I’m not sure it can compete directly with the likes of the iPhone and Android. The UI looks old and clunky and it doesn’t have a lot of the functionality and polish of the newer mobile offerings. That said, developers know it, it has a huge application catalog and an entrenched base. Whether that will be enough for Symbian to make it out of the Open Source process alive remains to be seen though, and in my opinion it isn’t a certainty. What Nokia does get is 1) options and 2) the perception that they are not sitting on their hands while Android and the iPhone pass it by. Even if Symbian can’t compete feature for feature with something like Android, this announce will serve to remove one of its key advantages. That alone is likely worth the investment to Nokia.

Further Reading:
Linux Foundation
Red Monk
SAI

–jeremy

Filed under Google, iPhone, Linux, maemo, Nokia, Open Source

LinuxQuestions.org Turns 8

June 25, 2008 Leave a comment

It was on June 25, 2000 that I made the very first post at LQ, introducing it to the world. Fast forward eight years and we have almost 3,200,000 posts and over 350,000 registered members. I don’t think the raw numbers tell the real story though. It continues to amaze me just how far the site has come. Despite our constantly growing size we remain one of the friendlier community sites on the web and much of the original feel and spirit of the site remain. That being said, there is always room for improvement. We’re going to refocus and redouble our efforts. Our commitment to our members remains as strong as ever. We’re currently looking for feedback on what we’re doing well and how we can improve. No one knows the site better than you, and we want to know what you think. I have to admit I feel a bit rejuvenated and am really looking forward to see how we can improve the site. I’d like to take this time to thank each and every LQ member. Without you, we’d be nothing. A special thanks goes out to the mod team, who’s dedication has allowed us to not only grow, but flourish…for eight years and counting.

–jeremy

Filed under LinuxQuestions.org

ISO puts standard for Microsoft's OOXML document formats on hold

June 13, 2008 Leave a comment

From Heise:

After member states filed four complaints against the standardisation of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) document format, the International Standards Organisation (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in Geneva have responded by postponing publication of the revised specification. As the ISO announced, the planned ISO/IEC DIS 29500 cannot be published until these complaints have been heard. Procedure requires that they be dealt with by the end of June, when the ISO and IEC have to hand over their comments on the complaints to two management committees for a final decision.

Brazil, India, South Africa, and Venezuela have officially filed complaints against the controversial certification of OOXML in expedited proceedings in Geneva. These emerging nations are concerned that no consensus was reached about which changes need to be made to the specification, which is more than 6000 pages long, during consultation on the numerous comments submitted at the end of February, after the first attempt to adopt OOXML as a standard failed in 2007. Specifically, they complained that concrete technical objections were not individually discussed .

The official press release:

Four national standards body members of ISO and IEC – Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela – have submitted appeals against the recent approval of ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML formats, as an ISO/IEC International Standard.

In accordance with the ISO/IEC rules governing the work of their joint technical committee ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology, the appeals are currently being considered by the ISO Secretary-General and the IEC General Secretary who, within a period of 30 days (to the end of June), and following whatever consultations they judge appropriate, are required to submit the appeals, with their comments, to the ISO Technical Management Board and the IEC Standardization Management Board.

The two management boards will then decide whether the appeals should be further processed or not. If they decide in favour of proceeding, the chairmen of the two boards are required to establish a conciliation panel which will attempt to resolve the appeals. The process could take several months.

According to the ISO/IEC rules, a document which is the subject of an appeal cannot be published as an ISO/IEC International Standard while the appeal is going on. Therefore, the decision to publish or not ISO/IEC DIS 29500 as an ISO/IEC International Standard cannot be taken until the outcome of the appeals is known.

It should be noted that this is not a directional change for the ISO. Their rules dictate that they have to postpone publishing the standard if any official appeals are made. Considering many of the countries originally filed comments that weren’t addressed, it’s very possible the ISO will decide not to process the appeals.

–jeremy

Filed under Microsoft, Open Formats, Open Standards Tagged with

As the ODF-OOXML world turns

June 2, 2008 1 Comment

I’m a bit behind on this, but it’s a topic I’ve been covering for a while now so I wanted to follow up. First, from the the 451 group:

Oh the drama. Most of us knew ISO approval of Microsoft’s OOXML format was not the end, but more of a beginning in the ongoing fight for the future’s file format. Any doubts of that were put to rest this week with a flurry of activity around OOXML’s approval, ODF adoption, Microsoft’s support and the stance of U.S. states and other governments.

Much of it started with Microsoft’s announcement that it would expand its Office 2007 format support, including ODF. The move, which means Office 2007 users will be able to set ODF as their default file format, is further evidence of changes at Microsoft and the need to support multiple formats and interoperability. However, it still drew criticism from a number of ODF proponents/OOXML opponents, whose concerns include the typical Microsoft skepticism, but also center on the software giant’s OOXML approval campaign and previous statements downplaying the market for ODF.

We also saw further objection to ISO’s OOXML approval, primarily an appeal from South Africa. As format expert and saga watcher Andy Updegrove points out here, the appeal centers on the approval process and also on the ‘business basis’ for OOXML’s fast-track approval. Despite that relatively rapid approval, Updegrove points out that, ironically, Microsoft Office users will not have the opportunity to use the file format until Microsoft’s coming Office 14, expected in 2010 at the earliest.

Microsoft credited customer and government demand for its new found ODF love, but we also saw indications it may also involve difficulties in backward compatibility with OOXML. As ZDNet’s Tom Espiner points out, ‘The company now says OOXML support would require substantially more work.’ This comes as no surprise to many open source software users who have come to the same conclusion over the years. In fact, the inability of Microsoft to support different versions of its own Office and format software has fueled many OpenOffice.org downloads over the last few years, including my own.

Still, customer demand as the reasoning behind Microsoft’s ODF support was reinforced by yet another development in the ongoing format saga: findings from the State of New York. While the state’s officials indicated it would be a mistake to name ODF or OOXML as the standard of choice, New York’s format wonks did indicate that openness is the path to the future. That does not necessarily mean ODF, but it certainly makes it more likely given the controversy, uncertainty and drama still surrounding OOXML.

Since that post, Brazil and India have also decided to appeal. The deadline to appeal has now passed. The India post by Andy contains some good “what comes next” information for those that are interested. The appeals all have some items in common, but each also has points made only by that country. It’s clear that Microsoft did some very shady things during this process. It’s a sad indication that the company is still not willing to compete on the merits of its products on the one hand. On the other hand, they recently announced that Office 2007 would support ODF but not OOXML:

Microsoft today announced that it would update Office 2007 to natively support ODF 1.1, but not to implement its own OOXML format. Moreover, it would also join both the OASIS working group as well as the ISO/IEC JTC1 working group that has control of the ISO/IEC version of ODF. Implementation of DIS 29500, the ISO/IEC JTC 1 version of OOXML that has still not been publicly released will await the release of Office 14, the ship date of which remains unannounced.

So they fast track an office format while a competing one already exists, push it through the approval process using tactics that are questionable at best and then decide to only implement the competing standard in the current shipping product. You couldn’t make this stuff up. It’s clear that the internal battle within Microsoft is still raging. Part of the company really want to change, but part of it really doesn’t. It remains to be seen which side will prevail, but it’s not difficult to see why many in the Open Source community remain wary.

–jeremy

Filed under Microsoft, ODF, Open Formats, Open Source, Open Standards

Ozzie: Open Source a more disruptive competitor than Google

June 2, 2008 Leave a comment

I’ve often said that for Microsoft to truly change, Ballmer will have to go. On the other hand, Microsoft should be clinging to some other top level execs with a kung fu grip. Ray Ozzie is one of those execs. The vision and leadership he’s shown over his career is exceptional. He gets it. With that in mind it wasn’t a real surprise to hear him say this:

Google has nothing on open source when it comes to potential competitive threats to Microsoft, according to Redmond’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie.

Ozzie fielded a number of questions on his role at Microsoft and the company’s evolving technology strategies during an appearance at the Sanford Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference on May 28. (I listened to his session via the Webcast.)

Ozzie reiterated that it often takes a strong competitor to truly galvanize Microsoft.

“Microsoft has built up a culture of crisis,” Ozzie told conference attendees.

Competitors like his former employer, Lotus, and now, Google, have spurred the company to make changes to its business to stay ahead, Ozzie said. But while Google is a “tremendously strong competitor,” Ozzie acknowledged, “open source was much more potentially disruptive” to Microsoft’s business. (He noted that, unlike Google, many open-source programmers aren’t beholden to shareholders.)

Ozzie said that competing with open source “made Microsoft a much stronger company.” He cited changes Microsoft has made to its business model — such as focusing on making its closed-source software interoperable with open-source products — as directly attributable to that competition.

You see, Google is a company… and Microsoft knows how to compete with companies (although they are proving completely unable to compete on the web, despite both huge efforts and large amounts of cash). Open Source is a movement, and that concept is proving troublesome for many at Redmond. Keep in mind that in my opinion Google would never have been possible without Open Source. Open Source enables companies like Google to exist, and that’s really powerful. It’s literally changing the rules of the game.

So why is Ballmer still in charge? I’m not sure. I thought the failed Yahoo! blunder may be enough to do him in, but it looks like that isn’t going to be the case. In a way, I guess many of us in the OSS world should be happy. The longer he’s around the more time we have to mature and hone our products and skills. It’s hard for a behemoth like MSFT to turn around, but once they do – look out.

–jeremy

Filed under Microsoft, Open Source

Ubuntu Live 2008 has been canceled

May 20, 2008 Leave a comment

A heads up to those of you who were planning on attending Ubuntu Live 2008 in Portland this July. The event has officially been canceled. From the site:

The Ubuntu Live conference, which was scheduled to take place July 21-22 in Portland, OR has been cancelled. We are planning to include some Ubuntu content in the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), also happening July 21-25 in Portland, Oregon. We invite those interested in future Ubuntu events and developments to watch http://www.ubuntu.com. For further inquiries, please contact pr@canonical.com.

I was looking forward to the event and as a sponsor LQ had just given away a gratis pass. More information as it becomes available.

–jeremy

Filed under Ubuntu, UbuntuLive

Gratis OSCON 2008 Conference Pass

May 14, 2008 Leave a comment

Are you interested in attending OSCON this year? It’s my pleasure to inform you that LQ is able to give away one full conference pass (a $1445.00 value) absolutely free of charge. See this LQ thread for more information on how to be eligible. We’ll pick a winner on May 31st, so you don’t have much time. OSCON is always a great conference and I’m looking forward to attending once again. If you don’t win but still plan on going, use “os08linq” when you register to save 15% off the best rate at the time. Good luck and see you in Portland.

–jeremy

NOTE: I continue to be disappointed in the QA of WordPress. How a bug that causes all RSS feeds to break for any site who has WP in a top level folder (not exactly an edge case) could sneak into a 2.5.1 release is beyond me. I apologize if you weren’t getting updates here or at LQ Radio. If you use WP you might want to check your feed. If the issue is impacting you, you can get the patch here.

Filed under Open Source, OSCON Tagged with

MySQL licensing redux

May 8, 2008 Leave a comment

A follow up to one of the more divisive announcements made at the MySQL Conference. From the 451 Group Blog:

After all the fuss it appears that MySQL will be remaining open source after all. As Kaj Arno and Monty Widenius report, Marten Mickos announced at CommunityOne that the MySQL Server will stay open source, as well as the forthcoming encryption and compression backup features, which MySQL had considered making available only to paying customers.

“The change comes from MySQL now being part of Sun Microsystems. Our initial plans were made for a company considering an IPO, but made less sense in the context of Sun, a large company with a whole family of complementary open source software and hardware products,” writes Kaj.

“My hope is that the experiment when it comes to closed source extensions developed by Sun is now ended. As far as I know, there is no existing plans for any closed source extensions to the MySQL server,” adds Monty.

While that seems pretty clear cut, there is still room for a little confusion. Kaj writes: “To financially support MySQL’s free and open source platform, we have a business model which allows both community and commercial add-ons, and we remain committed to it.”

Monty clarifies: “I interpret this, in the context of Mårten’s and Jonathan’s announcements, that we will continue to support and make available commercial addons to the MySQL server from third party, like the Infobright storage engine. Things that we develop ourselves at Sun, at least on the server, will continue to be open source.”

It was always made clear that the decision to ship closed extensions was made before the Sun acquisition. It’s good to see that Sun stepped up, listened to feedback and changed this. It may have made sense for a company looking to IPO, but it doesn’t make sense for Sun. While it’s now clear that Sun-shipped server code will now be open, they also made it clear that 3rd party commercial extensions will continue to be embraced. I see that as a good thing. The “at least on the server” qualifier does leave the door open for something on the MySQL periphery to be closed, but that’s been the case for a few years now (MySQL Monitor for instance). If you’d like to know more about the announcement, Monty has posted his opinion:

I was yesterday attending the “Open Tuesday” Sun & MySQL event. One of the first questions I got from the audience during my questions & answer session was what is my take of the recent MySQL proposition of having closed source parts/modules in the server.

I was very happy to be able to say that Mårten some hours earlier had announced on CommuntyOne that the MySQL server is and is always going to be open source.

It’s very good to see that Mårten is continuing to be responsive to the MySQL community and to the MySQL customers. Thanks to Mårten for doing the right thing! Thanks to the MySQL community for expressing their opinions!

Monty also posted a very good (and honest) assesment of the MySQL Conference here.

–jeremy

Filed under MySQL, Sun

Microsoft Walks Away from the Yahoo Deal

May 5, 2008 2 Comments

Unless you were in a cave over the weekend, I’m sure you’ve seen that Microsoft has walked away from its 40B+ Yahoo acquisition attempt. I’ve largely avoided the topic, but do have some commentary now. Note that many people think this is just a posturing attempt by Microsoft and that’s entirely possible. First let me say that I think the merger would have been spectacularly bad for Microsoft. The cultural and integration issues alone would have been nearly unsurmountable. Would the mail portion of the deal even have gotten regulatory approval? How many high profile departure would you have seen? How many projects that really give Yahoo much of its street credibility would have been crushed? I’m not sure that Flickr, delicious, Zimbra and many others would have gone to Microsoft given the choice. That being said I think the deal would have been bad for Yahoo as well. Microsoft has had a terrible track record on the web and has multiple cash cows to protect. In the end the only way I saw the deal being feasible would be if Microsoft spun things out into a fully autonomous company. I didn’t see any indication that was going to happen.

On to Ballmer, I really think this underscores the fact that he needs to go if Microsoft is going to turn itself around. He seemed to have no coherent plan here. It almost seems if he woke up one day really wanted Yahoo and just didn’t think it through. Microsoft wants to compete with Google so bad they seem to be getting irrational. It’s clear they can’t do this organically, but I really don’t think Yahoo was the answer.

Next come the shareholders. There’s already a ton of speculation that this will result in shareholders lawsuits. To me that makes no sense for a couple reasons. First, as a shareholder it will distract the company and further drive down the price of the stock. The more tragic part though is the current state of the street. Everyone is so concerned with the next days closing price that very few people take the long view anymore. Unless you’re day trading, if you invest in a company you should be looking at the long term. That means trusting management. IMHO shareholder lawsuits should be reserved for gross negligence and other egregious acts. We remain far too litigious and it’s going to come back to haunt us. FWIW, the stock currently sits in the mid-24 range, which makes it down about 12%. That’s not nearly as bad as some people were speculating. MSFT is up mildly.

On to morale. Most people within Microsoft seem to be happy about the deal falling through. Many jobs have been saved and they get to keep their $43B cash horde. This happiness may wear off as soon as they realize they still are not effectively competing in the space, but with that much cash they should be able to figure something out. Things aren’t as clear at Yahoo. Yang and co are clearly happy, but the rest of the staff seems to have people on all sides of the equation. It will take Yahoo having a couple very good quarters or making a really compelling announcement for that to change if I had to guess. It’s been a long few months if you work at YHOO.

So were do things go from here? There has been talk of Yahoo grabbing AOL. I can’t see that making any sense, but let’s hope Yahoo doesn’t do it just to look like they’re making moves. MySpace seems a little more reasonable. I also see reports that Yahoo should buy back a bunch of stock. At first glance that makes a ton of sense, since the board clearly thinks the stock is way undervalued at the moment. With only $2.5B or so in cash though, they won’t be able to make a big enough dent to really make it worth while. The money could almost certainly be spent better elsewhere.

Some additional thoughts:
* This deal would have been really bad for Open Source. Zimbra is the first thing that comes to mind, but Yahoo does more in the Open Source space than they get credit for.
* It looks like Bill Miller and a couple other huge holders would have gotten behind a deal in the $35 range. If Microsoft really wanted the company, they almost surely could have had it.
* It will be interesting to see if Yahoo moves forward with the Google outsourcing, or if that will prove to simply have been posturing.
* Yahoo must have made it really clear that if Microsoft went hostile, that they would poison pill themselves to death. We don’t get too many of these in our industry and Yahoo is actually setup poorly to defend against a proxy fight, since everyone comes up for election at once.

Additional reading:
Kara
NYT
“The distraction of Microsoft’s unsolicited proposal now behind us”

I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts on this as it unfolds.

–jeremy

Filed under Microsoft

The OpenSolaris Community v2: Prepare Yourself

May 2, 2008 Leave a comment

Sun is a company I plan on covering a bit more as they continue to delve deeper into Open Source. I’ve commented on the current messaging issue Sun has around its Open Source participation previously. I haven’t been following Open Solaris as much as I’d have liked, but this post by Ben gets you up to speed on the current situation:

Ian Murdock’s distro formly known as “Indiana” will be birthed as “OpenSolaris” in less than a week, being debuted at CommunityOne on May 5th. This will be a major landmark even in the history of Solaris, right up there with the BSD-to-SysV transition and release of the code. There is no talk at Sun regarding Solaris 11, when pushed the only quote I get is “over my dead body”, apparently coming from high within the organization. While no one will clarify on the situation, the current vibe seems to be that Solaris 10 will be with us for a very long time, in update purgatory, while the future revolves around the OpenSolaris distribution. Ultimately the decision will probly be made by Sun’s attempts to get ISV’s behind OpenSolaris… but this is only my hunch, I’ll continue pushing Sun to clarify the roadmap, perhaps at CommunityOne will learn more.

… Its time for a community reset. With the release of the OpenSolaris distro the last bits of the community started by Andy Tucker and Claire Giordano will be, in my view, gone away. The experiment in community official ended and replaced. Rather than the community being joint owners of Solaris it will be affirmed that Sun is firmly staying at the helm and we’re free to board the train and pitch in if we choose. Those of us fighting against the tide are now presented with a choice… give up and try to re-invent our roles in the “new reality” or continue to fight the inevitable like so many of those in our community who still whine if an OS doesn’t run on an i386 with 512K of RAM looking like a senile prick.

It seems clear to me that Sun is not going to give up full control of Open Solaris. To be fair, Red Hat didn’t go as open with Fedora as was initially assumed either. In the end, much of it comes down to how Sun perceives Solaris driving its bottom line. It used to be that Solaris sold expensive SPARC hardware. That’s not as much the case any more. Where that leaves Solaris is unclear to me. Sun is still driving innovation – you need look no further than DTrace and ZFS to see evidence of that. Does that sell enough Sun hardware to justify the engineering costs associated with Solaris? I don’t know, but at some point Sun is going to have to look very at that question and they may not like the answer they get.

While catching up on Open Solaris, I also came across two good posts by Ted. In What Sun was trying to do with Open Solaris he looks into what kinds of participation Sun was originally looking for when they launched Open Solaris. His Organic vs. Non-organic Open Source follow up delves into a Brian Aker comment about projects moving between “organic” and “non-organic” (or in the case of Solaris->Open Solaris, moving between proprietary and either organic/non-organic Open Source). These kind of issues are going to be getting more and more scrutiny if I had to guess, as more and more commercial Open Source companies are going to have to figure out their business models and hit revenue goals. The commercial Open Source space is starting to mature, and I don’t think some people are going to like it.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Open Source, Sun

← Older posts

Newer posts →