Linux Losing Market Share to Windows Server II

October 29, 2007 Leave a comment

As a quick follow up to this post, it seems that Dell is not seeing the same trend. From the article:

Dell CEO: Linux server sales increasing

Claims made by Microsoft that Linux violates its software patent have not affected sales of Linux-based hardware, according to Dell’s CEO Michael Dell.

Speaking at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Dell said his company has seen Linux uptake for servers increase faster than Windows server products, despite Microsoft’s claims.

He said: “On the server side Linux continues to grow nicely, a bit faster than Windows. We’re seeing a move to Linux in critical applications, and Linux migration has not slowed down.”

Just another data point to keep in mind, like I said this stat is particularly hard to track with any real accuracy. While on the topic of Dell and Linux, it looks like Ubuntu desktop sales are tracking as expected. From a recent interview:

Can you give me an idea of what embracing Linux/Ubuntu for the home desktop and laptop has done for Dell? What has changed, what has stayed the same?

Embracing Ubuntu Linux on our desktops and laptops seems to have really raised Dell’s visibility within the Linux community. We have been supporting, testing, developing for, and selling Linux for 8+ years here at Dell, but before the Ubuntu announcement, a lot of people didn’t know that we did any of that. The announcement certainly opened people’s eyes, and there seems to be much more awareness now that Dell is serious about supporting Linux.

What has not changed is our overarching philosophy and trying to make Linux “just work” on all of Dell’s systems. Through our work with Linux on our servers and workstations, our goal has always been to push all device driver support and bug fixes into the respective upstream projects and to our Linux vendors. Our goal is to have customers be able to choose their Linux distro of choice, install it on whatever Dell system they buy, and have the OS install and run flawlessly. While this is very hard to accomplish, we have had a lot of success over the years doing this, and was an easy model to extend into the other Dell product lines for Linux.

Previous to our Ubuntu product announcement, it was much more difficult to extend this model to consumer desktop and laptop technologies. We would have a conversations with vendors about pushing Linux support for their hardware, but without a Linux product offering from Dell for that hardware, it was very difficult to convince them to release Linux drivers. That has certainly changed now that we offer Ubuntu Linux, and we are making much more progress in our vendor discussions.

Another area that has changed is our thinking around OS support models. Traditionally for enterprise Linux customers, if we sell them an OS on their system, they expect and demand a high level of operating system support. That is certainly not the case for our Ubuntu Linux customers, who have stated very loudly that, for the most part, they do not want to pay for OS support, and would rather get support from the community. That is a much different support model from what we have traditionally used, but is certainly one that we have embraced.

The original sales estimates for Ubuntu computers was around 1% of the total sales, or about 20,000 systems annually. Have the expectations been met so far? Will Dell ever release sales figures for Ubuntu systems?

The program so far is meeting expectations. Customers are certainly showing their interest and buying systems preloaded with Ubuntu, but it certainly won’t overtake Microsoft Windows anytime soon. Dell has a policy not to release sales numbers, so I don’t expect us to make Ubuntu sales figures available publicly.

A couple interesting tidbits in there. It’s absolutely great to see Dell pushing for more native vendor Linux drivers. They ship the kind of number needed to get vendors to listen. Kudos.

–jeremy

Filed under Dell, Linux, Microsoft, Ubuntu

New York Times opens up code

October 29, 2007 Leave a comment

It’s great to see the outcome when someone inside a company truly gets Open Source. From the article:

The New York Times likes open source — so much so that, as it gradually moves more of its print operations online, it is nurturing a Web development team that has released two of its own open source projects.

XSL Cache is a PHP extension the Times is using to cache stylesheets on its Web site. DBSlayer is a tool the team developed to overcome LAMP scaling limitations that caused database replication processes to overwhelm the DB connection limits.

New York Times senior software architects Jacob Harris and Derek Gottfrid say they’ve received a mixed reception from the community, because some people just can’t understand why a print media company would jump feet first into the open source philosophy. But open source software use isn’t new to the Times, says Gottfrid. “I’ve been here a number of years, and open source has always played an integral part in everything we do.”

Gottfrid says the most frequent comment he hears about the New York Times’ foray into open source Web development is “‘That’s surprising.’ They general think of us just as a newspaper, so they don’t understand why we would be doing this. Is there a secret angle? But as soon as they read some posts, they start to break it down and understand. Now there’s a bunch of people interested in this.”

Harris agrees. “We’re no longer just a print company, we’re a technology company. We need to express ourselves in technological terms. The best way to do that is to give the developers a voice.”

While it’s a bit surprising to see a mainstream media company ahead of the curve like this, it’s a clear indication that a couple motivated people can make a huge difference even at a large company. Open Source enables this kind of thing. Kudos to Jacob and Derek for making it happen. I’d guess it was more work internally then they lead on in the article. I’d also guess it will pay large dividends in the end. I found another part of the article interesting:

Harris says he’s received some pushback from members of the open source community. “We went to OSCON, and some people were very excited that we were there, and some were like, what the hell are you doing here. A lot of people feel like we’re pretty much irrelevant, and that they know what our business model should be. When you talk to geeks, they say ‘just stop printing the newspaper,’ but that would pretty much bankrupt us overnight.”

I’ve been meaning to post about the current advertising bubble for a while. It’s outside the normal scope of this blog, but is something I follow fairly closely. This is a public reminder to make that post, but suffice it to say that I do not think the “free but ad supported” model is the panacea some people think it is (although it is indeed the right fit in many situations).

–jeremy

Filed under Open Source

Linux Losing Market Share to Windows Server

October 26, 2007 2 Comments

That’s the title of this eWeek article:

Linux growth in the U.S. x86 server market has, over the past six quarters, started to falter and reverse its positive course relative to Windows Server and the market as a whole.

The annual rate at which Linux is growing in the x86 server space has fallen from around 53 percent in 2003, when Windows Server growth was in the mid-20 percent range, to a negative 4 percent growth in calendar year 2006, IDC Quarterly Server Tracker figures show.

Over the same time period, Windows has continued to report positive annual growth, outpacing the total growth rate in the x86 market by more than 4 percent in 2006, indicating that Linux has actually lost market share to Windows Server over this time.

The same holds true for worldwide Linux x86 server shipments, which dropped from the huge annual growth rate of about 45 percent is 2003 to growth of less than 10 percent in 2006, the IDC figures show.

One of the biggest reasons for this is that the migrations from Unix to Linux have slowed down markedly.

“We have seen the rate of migration from Unix slow over the past few quarters,” IDC analyst Matt Eastwood told eWEEK. “In my view this is because much of the low-hanging fruit has been moved and the applications that remain on Unix are stickier because they are seen as business critical and more political candidates for migration overall.”

The truth is, most of the low-hanging fruit probably has been picked off. That’s not a bad thing, it’s simply part of the natural maturation process that Linux is inevitably going to go through. Historically, a large number of Linux migrations were from UNIX and NetWare. At some point, that was going to have to change. At some point, Linux was going to have to more directly compete with Windows on the server. Everyone knew that – why do you think Microsoft has been fighting so hard on the marketing side of things? It’s clear that time is coming soon… very soon. It’s not going to be easy, of course, but I think Linux is now very well positioned. It should also be noted that Linux is notoriously hard to track when it comes to these kinds of analysts reports. Many distributions that are being used in the data center now, such as Ubuntu, are not commercial products. Often times Linux is deployed on hardware that is being reused. There are a myriad reasons why the Linux number is extremely unreliable. I say let’s use that to our advantage. Let this be a wake up call for us and a reason for them to think they can sit back and rest on their laurels.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Microsoft

Devices Lacking Linux Support Needed

October 26, 2007 Leave a comment

Greg KH recently announced that Novell was letting him work on the Linux Driver Project full time. The response was huge, with over 300 developers answering the call. Lack of Linux drivers is usually pretty high up on the list of Linux shortcomings. But a follow up post by Greg indicates that there’s not enough work to keep all the developers busy:

There was a lot of very good press coverage over my last announcement of the restart of the Linux Driver Project and my involvement in it now full time. It’s been a few weeks since that announcement, and we now have over 300 different developers signed up to help create, and maintain Linux drivers!

I’ve also posted a short status report about the current projects, and what is going on with them. Since then, one more project has started, and there are a handful still in the planning stage.

What we need now is more companies participating in the project, we have the developers, but not enough work to keep them busy.

So how do we change this? I’m thinking that possibly, there really isn’t a large number of different devices out there that need Linux support written for them.

As proof of this, I give you the Linux Foundation’s Vendor Advisory Board. This group of companies publish a list of priorities that they feel need to be worked on in order to help Linux succeed.

Coming in at number 3 is “Device Driver Support”. So, I approached this group and asked them specifically what devices did they see in common use that are not supported by Linux (the obvious 2 video cards being a known exception.) Despite this being such a high priority for this group, they had no examples to provide.

And neither do I. I don’t currently know of any common piece of hardware in use today that is not supported on Linux. And since these vendors do not know, and I don’t, I’m asking the world to help out.

So, please, let me know what specific type of device you know of that is not properly supported on Linux. If you want, please mark up the wiki page at:

http://linuxdriverproject.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/DriversNeeded

Is the lack of Linux device drivers an issue that is a bit overblown by a couple of high profile examples? Is it a stigma held over from previous days when some areas, such as wireless networking, were poor? Visit the Linux Driver Project wiki if you have hardware that doesn’t work in Linux, and let them know.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Novell, Open Source

Mozilla Prism

October 26, 2007 1 Comment

It looks like Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight are going to get some competition from Mozilla. From the announcement:

Mozilla Labs is launching a series of experiments to bridge the divide in the user experience between web applications and desktop apps and to explore new usability models as the line between traditional desktop and new web applications continues to blur.

Unlike Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, we’re not building a proprietary platform to replace the web. We think the web is a powerful and open platform for this sort of innovation, so our goal is to identify and facilitate the development of enhancements that bring the advantages of desktop apps to the web platform.

The first of these experiments is based on Webrunner, which we’ve moved into the Mozilla Labs code repository and renamed to Prism.

Prism is an application that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop.

refracting.png

At least for now, this doesn’t look quite as robust as Adobe AIR (and I’ve not looked at Silverlight too closely) but it does seem like a natural progression for Firefox. You have to wonder how many of these environments developers are going to embrace. I’d guess there will be a small number of players that remain standing after a shakeout. AIR and Prism both plan to support Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

–jeremy

Filed under Adobe, Firefox, Open Source

Sun Sues NetApp: Says "You Cannot Unfree What Is Free"

October 26, 2007 1 Comment

Dave Hitz, Founder and EVP at NetApp, has responded to a post made by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Here’s his conclusion:

Jonathan’s claim that “you cannot unfree what is free” sets a very dangerous precedent. It says that you can steal anything, as long as you open source it afterwards. That can’t be right! I do understand that many open source proponents argue there should be no legal protection at all for information. “Information wants to be free.” But even if Jonathan believes that, he ought to wait until the law changes before taking Sun down that path.

One of the most important rules of open source is that you must only give away things that belong to you. If protected information does leak into open source, it will probably live forever in the web, but that isn’t the issue. To me, the issue is that large corporations should stop making a profit on protected information that doesn’t belong to them. That’s what we’re asking here.

Now, I’m not a lawyer and I don’t even play one on TV. I find it hard to believe that Sun ripped off code from someone and then Open Sourced the product so everyone could see the violation. Anything is possible I guess, but that doesn’t seem rationale. What’s interesting to me here is that both CEO’s are discussing this issue on their respective blog, in very a human tone and with comments enabled.

–jeremy

Filed under Open Source, Sun

Acacia's Latest Target: NetFlix

October 25, 2007 Leave a comment

It’s not just Red Hat and Novell. From TechDirt

Acacia has become one of the most hated firms by technology companies that actually do stuff. That’s because Acacia is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) firms out there in the business of buying up patents solely to sue companies. Acacia learned a while ago, though, that it was best to keep its name out of many of these suits, so it apparently tries to set up subsidiaries for many of the patents it buys (sometimes giving them silly names to make people think the companies actually do something). Now, one of those subsidiaries, named Refined Recommendation Corporation is suing Netflix over a patent it holds on optimizing interest potential. It’s a patent on the idea of making recommendations or presenting specific information based on user actions. I can recall both individuals and companies working on similar things well before this patent was applied for in 2000, but that’s a different issue altogether. Does anyone believe that Netflix (and plenty of other companies) wouldn’t be doing content recommendations for people without this particular “breakthrough”?

–jeremy

Filed under Novell, Open Source, Red Hat

Asian Linux Distributor Strikes Patent Covenant with Microsoft

October 25, 2007 Leave a comment

Looks like Microsoft struck another patent deal with a Linux distribution, this time it’s Turbolinux. From the article:

In a deal that could lead to the creation of a unique cross-platform authentication system for heterogenous networks, Tokyo-based Linux distributor Turbolinux announced this morning, Japan time, it has reached an agreement with Microsoft for a cross-licensing of the two companies’ patent portfolios.

On the surface, what Turbolinux gets out of this is the interoperability information it needs to develop a single-sign-on service, enabling users to authenticate themselves once and transfer that security authority between operating systems. That’s how Microsoft is playing up the deal today, as it announces it will establish a permanent workshop at its Beijing office “to focus on testing and showcasing solutions for customers and partners,” as last night’s announcement put it.

But Turbolinux could have gotten that information through a simple, one-way license agreement. By making the deal two-way, Microsoft opens up the possibility for a kind of front-end portal: a way to make Windows the logon prompt for Linux.

While Turbolinux CEO Yano Koichi characterized the deal as a way to help his customers perceive Turbolinux as “the distribution that works best with their existing Microsoft investments,” it’s perhaps impossible not to consider the implications of Microsoft being able to leverage its joint discoveries – to which it would presumably be fully licensed – in devising a similar portal for Linspire and Novell distributions, and perhaps others.

Not too interesting overall, but you can see two trends here. The distros that Microsoft is able to entice with these patent deals are becoming smaller and smaller. Second, each progressive deal is getting less and less coverage. This deal happened days ago and I just heard about it now. The fact that Turbolinux is not huge in the US may have something to do with it, but I’d say it’s part of a larger trend.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Microsoft

Microsoft and the EU anti-trust battle

October 25, 2007 Leave a comment

Earlier this week, Microsoft agreed with the EU Commission’s 2004 ruling that it was abusing its dominance in the market in the workgroup server market and would not appeal against a further EU court ruling, which upheld the Commission’s initial findings. Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for competition policy, called this “a victory for the consumer”, but noted her concern about how long it took for Microsoft to comply. Initial reactions in the blogosphere seemed to indicate that this “capitulation” was a win for Open Source. It appears this reaction may have been a little premature. From the article:

Perhaps I was a little quick to congratulate Neelie Kroes on a job well done forcing Microsoft to extend its interoperability protocols to open source software vendors and developers. It now appears that the terms of the agreement mean that it is incompatible with the GPL.

“I told Microsoft that it had to make interoperability information available to open source developers. Microsoft will now do so, with licensing terms that allow every recipient of the resulting software to copy, modify and redistribute it in accordance with the open source business model,” noted Kroes.

Glynn Moody points to the FAQ, which tells a different story, however:

“Can open source software developers implement patented interoperability information?
Open source software developers use various “open source” licences to distribute their software. Some of these licences are incompatible with the patent licence offered by Microsoft. It is up to the commercial open source distributors to ensure that their software products do not infringe upon Microsoft’s patents. If they consider that one or more of Microsoft’s patents would apply to their software product, they can either design around these patents, challenge their validity or take a patent licence from Microsoft.”

As Moody notes: the incompatible licenses include “the GNU GPL, as used by Samba, the only program that really cares about Microsoft’s damn protocols? And let’s not forget that this “patented interoperability information” isn’t even valid in Europe, because you can’t patent software or business methods or whatever you want to call this stuff. And yet the EU has just passed a quick benedictus on the whole bloody thing.”

Indeed, hardly seems like any kind of victory at all. This is no real remedy for the years of abuse, and the spectre of software patents still looms its ugly head. Mark Webbink puts it well:

“I, for one, just wish the Commission had gone a bit easier on the open source rhetoric. It is misleading from the standpoint that the settlement does not resolve all or even the biggest issues that open source will have with implementing these protocols.”

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Microsoft, Open Source

ZFS Puts Net App Viability at Risk?

October 25, 2007 1 Comment

It’s good to see a tech company acting sanely when it comes to litigation. A few excerpts from Jonathan Schwartz’s Weblog:

About a month ago, Network Appliance sued Sun to try to stop the competitive impact of ZFS on their business.

I can understand why they’re upset – when Linux first came on the scene in Sun’s core market, there were some here who responded the same way, asking “who can we sue?” But seeing the future, we didn’t file an injunction to stop competition – instead, we joined the free software community and innovated.

One of the ways we innovated was to create a magical file system called ZFS – which enables expensive, proprietary storage to be replaced with commodity disks and general purpose servers. Customers save a ton of money – and administrators save a ton of time. The economic impact is staggering – and understandably threatening to Net App and other proprietary companies. As is all free innovation, at some level. So last week, I reached out to their CEO to see how we could avoid litigation. I have no interest whatever in suing them. None whatever.

Their objectives were clear – number one, they’d like us to unfree ZFS, to retract it from the free software community. Which reflects a common misconception among proprietary companies – that you can unfree, free. You cannot.

Second, they want us to limit ZFS’s allowable field of use to computers – and to forbid its use in storage devices. Which is quizzical to say the least – in our view, computers are storage devices, and vice versa (in the picture on the right – where’s the storage? Answer: everywhere). So that, too, is an impractical solution.

We’re left with the following: we’re unwilling to retract innovation from the free software community, and we can’t tolerate an encumbrance that limits ZFS’s value – to our customers, the community at large, or Sun’s shareholders.

So now it looks like we can’t avoid responding to their litigation, as frustrated as I am by that (as I said, we have zero interest in suing them). I wanted to outline our response (even if it tips off the folks at Net App), and for everyone to know where we’re headed.

So we have a CEO that, even faced with being sued is trying to personally reach out and avoid litigation. Kudos. It’s unfortunate that it didn’t work out, but it’s great to see how much Jonathan groks Open Source. So where are things headed?

Third, we file patents defensively. Like MySQL or Red Hat, companies similarly competing in the free software marketplace, we file patents to protect the communities from which innovation and opportunity spring. Unlike smaller free software companies, we have one of the largest patent arsenals on the internet, numbering more than 14,000 issued and pending globally. Our portfolio touches nearly every aspect of network computing, from multi-core silicon and opto-electronics, to search and of course, a huge array of patents across storage systems and software – to which Network Appliance has decided to expose themselves.

And to be clear, once again, we have no interest whatever in suing NetApps – we didn’t before this case, and we don’t now. But given the impracticality of what they’re seeking as resolution, to take back an innovation that helps their customers as much as ours, we have no choice but to respond in court.

So later this week, we’re going to use our defensive portfolio to respond to Network Appliance, filing a comprehensive reciprocal suit. As a part of this suit, we are requesting a permanent injunction to remove all of their filer products from the marketplace, and are examining the original NFS license – on which Network Appliance was started. By opting to litigate vs. innovate, they are disrupting their customers and employees across the world.

In addition to seeking the removal of their products from the marketplace, we will be going after sizable monetary damages. And I am committing that Sun will donate half of those proceeds to the leading institutions promoting free software and patent reform (in specific, The Software Freedom Law Center and the Peer to Patent initiative), and to the legal defense of free software innovators. We will continue to fund the aggressive reexamination of spurious patents used against the community (which we’ve been doing behind the scenes on behalf of several open source innovators). Whatever’s left over will fuel a venture fund fostering innovation in the free software community.

NTAP is down about 3% so far today. It should be interesting to watch how this unfold, not only for NetApp clients but also for its ramification for Open Source.

–jeremy

Filed under Open Source, Sun

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