IBM aims to lower cost of using Linux, Apple PCs

February 12, 2007 Leave a comment

This article contains an announcement that I think may be interesting. The one problem is that I can't actually figure out exactly what it is. From the article:
IBM said on Sunday it will offer an open desktop software system for businesses that puts the cost of managing Apple or Linux computers on a more equal footing with Microsoft's Windows software, improving the economics of Windows alternatives.
The product – which the company calls its “Open Client Offering” – pulls together software IBM has developed in-house and with partners Novell Inc and Red Hat Inc to answer questions over the cost-effectiveness of managing Linux or Apple desktop PCs alongside Windows PCs.
International Business Machines Corp said the new software makes it feasible for big businesses to offer their employees a choice of running Windows, Linux or Apple Macintosh software on desktop PCs, using the same underlying software code. This cuts the costs of managing Linux or Apple relative to Windows.
What I'm unsure of it what “same underlying software code” actually means. Also from the article:
“We worked with the open source community and found a way to write software once that will work regardless of operating system. It will run on Windows, Macintosh or Linux,” said Scott Handy, IBM's vice president of Linux and open source.
As an alternative to Microsoft, IBM will offer its own Open Document Format (ODF) software for tasks like word processing, spreadsheets or presentations, along with Lotus collaboration, instant messaging and blog tools, and the Firefox Web browser, which is the biggest rival to Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Fantastic that IBM continues to support ODF, but I'm still lost. Is this something based on emulation or Virtualization? A custom selected collection of Java apps or some kind of Java desktop? A slick management tool? After a bit of poking around I found this official IBM presentation, which answers some questions but I'm still not 100% clear. It seems that this is some kind of portal based on Rich Internet Applications, Web Services, the Eclipse framework and J2EE. I look forward to a less marketing driven explanation :) If anyone finds something along these lines (or is familiar with the product), I'd appreciate a pointer.
–jeremy
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Filed under IBM, Linux, Main Page, Open Source

SCALE Wrap-up

February 12, 2007 Leave a comment

Sitting in LAX at the moment, waiting on the arrival of a delayed flight. This marks the end of another fantastic SCALE. Ilan and crew once again did a remarkable job. The speakers were superb and I again learned quite a bit and got a few good laughs out of the presentations. The slides and audio should be up on the SCALE site soon and I highly recommend you check them out. I actually made it out of the hotel this year, even if it was only for a quick walk to a local restaurant with Jono and Dave. The after conference was once again lively and it was great to be able to both catch up with some people who I haven't seen in a while and meet some really good people for the first time. I'd say a good time was had by all, although by the end of day two quite a few people seemed fairly worn out. Time to start making plans for SCALE 6 as this is a conference I'll certainly make a point of attending each year.
–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

Arrived in LA for SCALE 5x

February 11, 2007 Leave a comment

I arrived a bit late, but safely, in LA and am about to go downstairs to pick up my conference badge. A reminder that if you'll be anywhere near LA this weekend, SCALE is definitely worth checking out.
–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

The Contradictory Nature of OOXML (Part II)

February 10, 2007 Leave a comment

[Ongoing coverage of this story] Andy continues his excellent coverage of the OOXML ISO process. From his post:
In that first blog entry, I concluded that Microsoft had won the first point in the contest over whether its document format would become a global standard or not. With the deadline past, who would be found to have won the next?
Well the results are in, and an unprecedented nineteen* countries have responded during the contradictions phase – most or all lodging formal contradictions with Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC), the ISO/IEC body that is managing the Fast Track process under which OOXML (now Ecma 376) has been submitted. This may not only be the largest number of countries that have ever submitted contradictions in the ISO/IEC process, but nineteen responses is greater than the total number of national bodies that often bother to vote on a proposed standard at all.
[*Update: make that twenty]
When it is recalled that any national body responding would first have had to wade through the entire 6,039 pages of the specification itself, and then compose, debate and approve its response in only 30 days, this result is nothing less than astonishing. Truly, I think that this demonstrates the degree to which the world has come to appreciate the importance of ensuring the long-term accessibility of its historical record, as well as the inadvisability of entrusting that heritage to a single vendor or software program.
There is further coverage of what actually constitutes a “contradiction” here. I'd say this level of response, especially in such a short time frame, is quite telling. It remains to be seen how Microsoft will respond, but the writing is on the wall. World Governments have learned that being beholden to a single vendor is just bad practice. Additional information on the numbers and what they mean.
In related news:
But while this global drama has been playing out, I've learned that a third US state is considering requiring use of open document formats by government agencies (Massachusetts and Minnesota are the other two to date). That state is Texas, where a bill has been introduced to require that only “open document formats” should be permitted. The bill is designated SB 446, and was filed on February 5 (the full text is reproduced at the end of this blog entry).
How does the Texas bill define an open document format? As stated in the bill, such a format would need to be based upon Extensible Markup Language, would need to have been previously approved, and would be required to meet the following criteria:
(1) interoperable among diverse internal and external platforms and applications;
(2) published without restrictions or royalties;
(3) fully and independently implemented by multiple software providers on multiple platforms without any intellectual property reservations for necessary technology; and
(4) controlled by an open industry organization with a well-defined inclusive process for evolution of the standard.
While a couple of those requirements are a bit nebulous, number 3 is not and would currently be a death knell for OOXML. We'll have to follow this bill and see how it does as it makes its way through the process. It should also be interesting to see if any additional states follow the lead of these three.
–jeremy
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Filed under Linux, Main Page, Microsoft, Open Source

What if Hardware Vendors are Trapped Too?

February 9, 2007 Leave a comment

chromatic has a very good post on his blog about hardware vendors providing open drivers and specs. This is a topic I've covered before. In the post he goes through a variety of reasons you'll often see from vendors and gives a counterpoint. His conclusion sums it up very well though:
Unfortunately, the best choice is not to buy such hardware, when possible. (It’s often a question of pragmatism versus expedience, where short-term benefits mask long-term problems.)
That’s often not possible, especially when buying specialized hardware or devices with difficult-to-replace components, such as laptops.
However, it's clear that the normal approach – that is, complaining in small groups and rewarding vendors with your business anyway – is not working. Nor does reverse engineering drivers address the root of the problem. It's valuable in that it mitigates the damage, but it does little to prevent further problems.
Acknowledging vendors with the courage to deal with their customers respectfully and honestly may help. Free and open source software advocates can do a much better job of praising honest efforts to work with communities – and to encourage other companies to do so in a mutually beneficial way.
The ultimate long-term answer is continued work to produce actual and lasting reform of legal systems that reward information hoarding to dangerous extremes. This change will only occur with focused and directed action from the people affected. This means you. Have you shared your concerns about software patents with your legal representative lately? (However, if you like software patents and DRM that prevents fair use, then now is a time for very quiet reflection.)
It’s unfortunate that the acts of a few dedicated individuals and companies have so punished both vendors and their customers. Instead of casting aspersions on each other, perhaps working together for common interests will both increase the market for high-quality hardware from trustworthy vendors and provide free and open source communities with open and redistributable drivers and specifications.
He's right: we should do a better job of dealing with vendors with the courage to deal with their customers respectfully and honestly. Fixing a very broken legal system is also certainly the long term answer. The question becomes, what is the best way to make this happen in an expeditious manner. There's probably no one specific answer, but focused and directed action also seems like the best course to me. If you have a few free moments today, why not take action yourself. What you do is up to you, but do something. In the end, it's up to all of us.
–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

How To Tell The Open Source Winners From The Losers

February 6, 2007 Leave a comment

That's the questions asked in this InformationWeek article. The article covers a variety of topics and is worth reading, but I'll cover a couple highlights.
There are 139,834 open source projects under way on SourceForge, the popular open source hosting site. Five years from now, only a handful of those projects will be remembered for making lasting contributions–most will remain in niches, unnoticed by the rest of the world. For every Linux, Apache, or MySQL, dozens of other open source efforts fizzle out.
That's a dilemma for the many companies that are expanding their use of open source. Corporate developers and other IT professionals must get better at divining the winners and ignoring the losers. The wrong picks can lead companies down a rat hole of support problems and obsolete software.
I find that last sentence to be an interesting one. I can't tell you the number of times I've seen companies in trouble because a proprietary vendor either went out of business or stopped releasing a product. With Open Source, at least you always have options. Also, a couple notes on SourceForge. The majority of really huge (ie. the actual components of the LAMP stack), don't use SF these days. Some vary popular projects still do, but after those I've always broken the rest of the tail into a couple categories. There are the new apps that are legitimately getting off the ground and the apps that legitimately are abandoned or junk. There is another interesting group though. The apps that are genuinely useful and work quite well, but are very specific in nature. The ones that address a really small niche or control an obscure piece of hardware. While the downloads on these may not be huge, in their own context I'd consider them huge successes. That's a category of apps you just don't see in the proprietary world.
No Community, No Project
Many think of an open source “community” as a passel of unpaid developers who code because they love it, but that's not the driving force behind most of the work. In general, only a small group is allowed to modify or submit changes to source code. Other developers submit code to these core developers. But most important for companies assessing the health of a project is the size–and motivation–of the group of users hammering away on the code and identifying what's wrong with it, and how the project responds to that input.
An active community is part of what set Apache apart in the mid-1990s from other freeware, of which IT managers were rightfully wary, says Apache founder Brian Behlendorf. Instead of a site packed with free code, at Apache.org potential business users found the code as it was being developed, with comments being exchanged on recent work. “It was easy to ask questions, to sign up for the mailing list, to see the long conversational threads on support questions,” he says.
Behlendorf is describing the transparency that still marks any vibrant open source project. A community needs to be measured by its activity and transparency as much as its size. The reasons for decisions must be clear, with threads of discussion in forums leading up to them, and negative and positive comments getting their airing. That's one of open source's most powerful ingredients.
Community is absolutely vital to a sucessful Open Source apps. I don't think enough can be said about that. A lot of how the community runs though, comes down to one of the other points they make:
MySQL, Linux, and other successful open source projects all have this in common: a Linus Torvalds sort of figure, a benevolent dictator with the humility to see the value in other people's work. At JBoss, it was Marc Fleury. At MySQL, it's a pair of developers, Monty Widenius and David Axmark, who produced the early versions of MySQL and selected the smooth Marten Mickos as CEO. Ross Mason is the undisputed development leader of Mule, an enterprise service bus gaining traction at financial institutions. Mason's also the founder of MuleSource, the company behind it. At Samba, founded in 1992 to provide file and print capabilities across Windows, Unix, and Linux, it's the diplomatic yet decisive Jeremy Allison.
While it's possible to make it without one of these benevolent dictators it's much much more difficult. In the end it's really almost a component of the community. One that not only keeps things running smoothly, but also provides guidance and long term vision. A well respected leader is also able to diffuse the tenuous situations that well inevitably rise up.
Innovation, Luck and Timing are also huge pieces to the puzzle, as the article points out. While I don't agree with everything in the article, in the end I do think their 9 point checklist for “How To Spot A Successful Open Source Project” are fairly accurate, at least in the Commercial Open Source space:
A thriving community, Disruptive goals, A benevolent dictator, Transparency, Civility, Documentation, Employed developers, A clear license, Commercial support
While your company should look further than that list and should always download the actual code and throughly evaluate the product, the above is a good anecdotal starting point. How does the Open Source software you're evaluating stack up?
–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

LQ Radio ogg RSS Feed

February 5, 2007 Leave a comment

A quick update on the LQ Radio ogg RSS feed. From day one we have supported ogg at LQ Radio. In fact, every audio release we've ever done has been released in both mp3 and ogg format. That being said, the RSS feed for podcatchers only offered the enclosure in mp3 format. About two weeks ago we started offering an ogg feed in addition to the mp3 feed. In that two weeks, a full 5% of subscribers have moved over. If you're subscribed to the mp3 feed and are able to use ogg, I'd encourage you to move over to the unencumbered format at your leisure. To clarify, we are committed to supporting both formats long term.
–jeremy
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Filed under Linux, LinuxQuestions.org, Main Page, Open Source, podcast

Interview: Jens Axboe

February 1, 2007 Leave a comment

A fantastic in-depth interview with Jens Axboe has been posted over at KernelTrap. If you're interested in block layer stuff, schedulers or the kernel development process in general, this is a must read. If you don't learn something from each and every KernelTrap interview that Jeremy posts, you are either a serious kernel ninja or Linus.
–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source, Oracle

MySQL AB – a new product and an IPO

February 1, 2007 Leave a comment

Speaking of Open Source companies that understand their market and core strengths, MySQL AB has also been on a tear. Earlier this week, the company announced its MySQL Enterprise Unlimited program. From the press release:
MySQL AB, developer of the world's most popular open source database, today unveiled a simpler way for large and growing organizations to acquire and adopt enterprise software. Designed with a customer’s perspective in mind, a one-year MySQL Enterprise Unlimited subscription offers a company-wide enterprise site agreement at the unprecedented low price of $40,000 (EUR 32,000, GBP 24,000).
“MySQL Enterprise has made it significantly easier to purchase database software and technical support for our entire organization,” said Glenn Bergeron, systems manager for Instaclick Inc., one of the first companies to take advantage of MySQL Enterprise Unlimited. “This new offering is ideal for corporate IT organizations with a growing number of projects but a tightly-fixed budget.”
MySQL Enterprise Unlimited is designed for companies with existing site licenses for Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase and IBM DB2. Last year, a survey of the Independent Oracle User Group showed that a full third of its membership also used MySQL1. With a MySQL Enterprise Unlimited subscription, an organization can develop, manage and fully support any number of MySQL database applications — significantly reducing IT time, cost and risk.
“Due in large part to advantages in distribution and volume, open source has the ability to disrupt traditional enterprise software pricing,” said Stephen O'Grady, principal analyst for RedMonk. “MySQL is attempting to prove as much with its latest site wide agreements, which offer customers the ability to support every database across their enterprise at a fraction of the traditional cost.”
Make no mistake about it, MySQL AB could have actually raised the price of their main product and still sold more. Instead they have chosen a plan which I think has a higher upside potential long term. Matt covers some of the reason the company is able to do this:
Zack told me over email (in response to my question, “How can you possibly make money at that price?):
The reason we can make money is because:
-The software really works
-And we don't have expensive Armani-wearing Ferrari-driving sales reps closing 40K deals.
Expanding on that is a post on Zack's blog. This isn't just about Oracle, it's about disrupting the industry. That's why this is a long term play. It's game changing. A lot of proprietary companies may have raised their rates as mentioned earlier, to boost the bottom line in the short term. It all looks very nice on the balance sheet. MySQL represents what I consider the future. Vibrant sustainable companies that treat their customers like partners and not like prey.
I see that the company is now looking at an IPO. As you may have guessed by my previous comments, I'll certainly try to get in on that. As you may have also guessed, I also regularly recommend and implement MySQL and run it on a site that gets a considerable amount of traffic.
–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, MySQL, Open Source, Oracle, Red Hat

Red Hat's Volley on Linux Management Offering

February 1, 2007 Leave a comment

A recent article on InternetNews.com points to some moves by Red Hat that could have a large impact on Open Source in the Enterprise. From the article:
The leading Linux distributor told internetnews.com that it is rolling out online monitoring tool this year Red Hat customers.
Rich Friedman, director of product management for the Red Hat Network, told internetnews.com the management tool is already in use with a select group of customers with expanded rollouts planned throughout the year.
“We provide a set of services that can monitor systems and we handle the background work of collecting metrics, analyzing them, sending out availability and performance alerts,” Friedman said. “We provide reporting charting and history and even more capabilities in terms of managing how you set up alerts and it's all from an online perspective.”
“What we'll be doing with RHN 5 is providing support and capabilities around virtualization management,” Friedman said. [This includes] “focusing on what we do from a Red Hat RHEL perspective and the capabilities we have and the ability to control the system from a central place.”
Red Hat is taking a different angle than a one-console approach to managing all the enterprise components. “One console to serve all purposes is not as important as managing RHEL with the best capabilities,” Friedman said. “That's where we focus.”
And it's not just Oracle with which Red Hat wants to contrast its approach. Freidman said Red Hat's goal is to integrate with the big systems management vendors and work with them in a complementary manner.
Though Red Hat's goal is not be like the big systems management vendors, it is pursuing an effort to open up RHN so that it can manage more applications.
By opening up the infrastructure like this they will be allowing other companies to use it as a framework to build all kinds of compelling applications that can be brought to market much faster and for much lower costs. All the while they'll be cementing themselves as a core piece of the puzzle. This sums it up nicely:
Friedman explained that Red Hat is currently working on a platform for systems management that open source projects will be able to leverage to provide systems management out of the box. “Not to be an OpenView (HP's enterprise management product) or any one else in that arena but really as a way that you can integrate a base platform, and then provide a plug-in that will mange your product set,” Friedman said.
It's that kind of focus along with an understanding of their market and core strengths that allows Red Hat to do so well. I for one hope they are able to continue to execute as they have been. With moves like this, you have to think they well. Well done.
–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source, Red Hat

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