Google is at it Again – Web Analytics

November 14, 2005 Leave a comment

Another “you probably saw it coming” from Google, but as usual they have gone above and beyond. Enter Google Analytics. From the page: Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site. You'll be able to focus your marketing resources on campaigns and initiatives that deliver ROI, and improve your site to convert more visitors. Basically they took the Urchin product they acquired in March, added AdWords integration and Google polish and then made it free. The site has been extremely slow or completely down for most of the day, but I was able to sneak in and sign up. I'll let you know what I think in a couple of days, but it does look pretty slick. Google once again gets access to more data about how people browse and use data. One interesting thing I noticed about the EULA was that it claimed the product was for non-commercial use only, which seems odd given the marketing verbiage on the product page (track ROI, track initiates, integration with AdWords). It may just be a typo or it may mean a for pay layered product is coming soon. One other limitation is that you get a max of 5 Million impressions a month, unless you have an AdWords account.
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–jeremy

Filed under Main Page

Birthday Memo leaked on Purpose?

November 12, 2005 1 Comment

Robert X. Cringely thinks the birthday memo may have been leaked on purpose. Some of the reasons he gives really make sense. Is Microsoft using this as a PR stunt meant to both entice Wall Street while painting Google as the bad guy (and itself as the good guy)? Here's a snippet from the article: These Microsoft memos look like a plan to do the same thing Microsoft “thinks” Google will be doing. By publicly stating their plans and putting those plans in the hands of Wall Street, Microsoft is giving the perception they are doing the same things as Google, so Microsoft will be as good an investment as Google.
The real questions to me are: 1) Is Microsoft sincere in its focus change (whether the memo's were leaked on purpose doesn't matter in this context) and 2) If it is sincere, will it be able to execute. Don't forget that, historically, Microsoft is not willing to do anything that even has a remote chance of in any way damaging their cash cows – Windows and Office. What are others saying about this? Scoble has a summary post. I find it interesting that mini-MSFT has been completely silent on this topic.

–jeremy

Filed under Main Page, Microsoft, Open Source

Suse Linux Founder Exits Novell

November 10, 2005 1 Comment

Suse Linux founder, and kernel maintainer for more then a decade, Hubert Mantel has announced his resignation from Novell. “Too late for me. I just decided to leave Suse/Novell, this is no longer the company I founded 13 years ago.” were his parting words. Novell has a terrible history of wasted opportunity with technically superior products, but poor marketing. I held high hopes for them this time, but with this news along with the layoffs and other high profile departures, one has to wonder. I think the following comment is extremely telling: “I have been the maintainer of the Suse kernel for more than a decade now,” Mantel wrote. “I'm very confident the Novell management will find a competent successor very quickly. After all, there are lots of extremely skilled people over there in the Ximian division.” Clearly there is more to this story. Does it have to do with the recent KDE announcement? Does it have to do with a different internal struggle that was lost by the Suse division? Hard to tell at this point, but the recent grumblings I've heard about “being noising” gaining more ground within the company than “being correct” may have some basis. Please Novell, don't screw this up. Having two solid Enterprise distributions is critical. Companies learned a lesson with Microsoft, and they don't want to be beholden to a single company anymore. I'd guess we'll hear more details and see more fallout from this turn of events quite soon.
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–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

Gates/Ozzie Challenge Microsoft to “Alter Its Business” – Birthday Memo

November 9, 2005 1 Comment

Another leaked memo from Microsoft (Dave has posted the full emails here). “This coming 'services wave' will be very disruptive,” Gates said in an Oct. 30 e-mail to top Microsoft employees. “We have competitors who will seize on these approaches and challenge us.” The service wave has been coming for a while, it's all part of the ever popular Web2.0 meme. Microsoft once again finds itself waking up late to the party and realizing that they've been left behind. A day late, but never a dollar short. On the bright side for them, they aren't as late to this party as they've been for some others. However, unlike some previous occasions, they won't really be able to leverage their desktop monopoly in this case – at least not to the degree they have in others. Google transcends the OS. Beyond that, though, it's tuned into a verb… it has mindshare. While Microsoft can throw a huge amount of eyeballs at their offering, that doesn't always help. Take the auction space for instance. Amazon and Yahoo! throw huge amount of eyeballs at their respective offerings, but neither has put a dent in eBay. Like Google, eBay has mindshare in their space. Microsoft has proven to always be a worthy adversary, but outside the desktop and related areas they don't always win. The Xbox is still a loser to the PlayStation, MS-based MP3 players are losing big time to the iPod, Windows-based phone aren't what Microsoft hoped – you get the idea. Unlike say Netscape, from the past, I think Google is in this one for the long haul and is positioned well to hold its own. Scoble, who you have to think has had some influence on this thinking (be it directly or indirectly) is still reeling from the memos. It should be interesting to read what he has to stay when he stops reeling. This should be a battle the like of which the space hasn't seen in years. In the end, the consumer will be the ones who benefits from the competition. Should be a fun ride.
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–jeremy

Filed under Main Page, Microsoft, Open Source

Should Linux Have a Binary Kernel Driver Layer?

November 8, 2005 Leave a comment

For those of you that follow LKML at all, you know this is a hotly debated topic. Greg K-H recently posted aboutan OSDL meeting on this topic, along with a follow up. This is a really interesting topic to me. Now, we all know that binary drivers are bad. Here's a post from a Microsoft employee with some details. Like most stories though, there are multiple sides with multiple views here. There are certainly some cases where a company releasing a 100% GPL driver is impossible, due to licensing, 3rd party agreements, whatever. I've even heard (warning, I've not taken the time to verify this) that in some cases it would be illegal to even release proper documentation on API's and interfaces, which would allow kernel maintainers to write a driver. In some other cases, a company may simply decide they don't want to release a Linux driver (be it company culture, company policy, FUD, to prevent tampering, a PHB's whim – whatever). The reality though is that the less driver support there is for Linux, the less mass adoption we'll get. I don't think that is arguable. BUT, the reason I like Linux and one of the reasons it has gotten as far as it has is because it values technical correctness, stability and performance over “adoption”. The question is, and I posted something else about this recently, what price are we willing to pay for mass adoption. It's a tough question and the answer certainly depends on what side of the coin you're on. I for one hope we continue to value technical correctness, speed and stability. For now, I think we will. As for the long run, well – I'm not sure.
On an unrelated note, I find Greg's comments on OSDL “technical management” a bit troubling. OSDL has become quite important to Linux and I'd hate to see them drop the ball. Let's hope this was just an anomaly or a genuine one time miscommunication (which certainly happen).
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–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

Microsoft: Open Source Not That Open

November 8, 2005 1 Comment

This article is about a presentation that was made at the OSBC. LQ was a show sponsor and I had hoped to attend, but that didn't work out. Jason Matusow, director of Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative, claimed that Open Source is really not all that open. He bases this on the following:
Red Hat issues patch updates for its premium offering, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and keeps customers' IT infrastructure secure.
“But if a customer modifies the source code, [Red Hat] can't help you [without charging you extra]. They have to lock things down to provide value,” Matusow said. “As open source becomes commercialized, it becomes less open.”
Sound reasonable right? No, not at all. He's missing multiple points and is trying to create FUD (or is misinformed). First, you can make all the changes you want and still get support from Red Hat – as long as you can prove you didn't cause the breakage. This just makes sense. Change some Firefox code and have a kernel problem? The kernel would be 100% supported by Red Hat. Change some kernel code and have a kernel problem? Obviously you'll need to recreate the problem with a stock kernel or diagnose the problem yourself. That's not less open, it's common sense. In fact, it's the way many many industries work (Change the tires on your car and have an engine problem, Ford will help you. Change the engines internals and have an engine problem, you're on your own). Beyond this though, he misses one of the main benefits of Open Source from a client perspective. You avoid vendor lockin! Don't like the kernel support you are getting from Red Hat? What if they discontinue support for a product you use? Go to Novell, IBM , Progeny or one of the other myriad support services that will be happy to help you. You can even hire a whizzbang kernel guy and do it in house. The choice is yours. Have that same problem in a closed shop and your options are 0. Once Microsoft abandons a product it is 100% unsupported…and worse it's 100% unsupportable! No code upgrades, no bug fixes, no security patches – ever.
One final thing that I found amusing was the following comment: We are building intellectual property into software and trying to sell it. We throw code over the wall for the community to build on it. Throw code over the wall?? Seems like an odd choice of words to me, almost condescending. And he said this in a room full of Open Source people, which means that statement made it past the PR people! Do you really want a vendor that not only talks that way, but thinks that way? The choice is yours.
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–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Microsoft, Open Source

Novell to Standardize on GNOME

November 5, 2005 1 Comment

With the acquisition of Ximian some time ago, you kind of had to see this coming. Novell will move future versions of SLES and NLD to Gnome. KDE will continue to be supported in OpenSuse. This will likely cause a lot of fallout from KDE users and traditional Suse users as Suse was one of the most popular KDE-centric distros (and in fact had a ton to do with KDE development in the past). This distinction now goes with Mandriva. It's interesting that KDE tends to be extremely popular in Europe. The reality however is that SLES and NLD users could probably care less for the most part. While we in the OSS world tend to love choice and tinkering with our desktop, enterprise users (and especially admins) tend to like uniformity and simplicity. While we tend to be vehement about some of our choices (KDE vs. Gnome, vi vs. emacs, etc), enterprise users usually don't even know what they are running (or know that there even is a choice). With RHEL standardizing on Gnome a while back, Novell acquiring a Gnome company and also having to cut costs – well, like I said…you probably saw this coming. The sad part is, the further these large companies get into the enterprise markets, the more of this we'll see. For this mainstream Linux adoption that everyone has been talking about to happen, consistency is a must. You think most OSX users know if they are running a Cocoa app or a Carbon one? This is going to be a tough pill to swallow. Luckily most projects will probably live on in a niche capacity for those of us that like choice, but some will probably unfortunately fold when the lack of corporate funding starts to kick in. For those of you who wanted corporate adoption, I hope you knew this was the price that was eventually going to have to be paid. When you shift from doing it for the love to doing it for the money, sometimes the rules change. It's not all bad though. In the end stability and ease of use should vastly improve, “porting to Linux” will begin to get easier as there are less platform choices and mainstream adoption will become a reality. Will the price have been worth it? We'll see.
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–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

Google Paying for Firefox Installs

November 5, 2005 1 Comment

What is that thing you ask? Google is indeed paying for Firefox downloads with the Google toolbar bundled in. It seems like a win/win/win to me. You get about a buck, the downloadee gets a good browser and Google not only gets to get a leg up on a competitor, but also gets a good amount of cash (via more searches done using the toolbar). I'm guessing this may be a response to rumors that MSN will be much more integrated into Vista. One thing to be aware of on this is that you should read the fine print. You get up to a dollar, depending on the location of the user and only if they have never had Firefox installed before. Seems a bit sleep. If that wasn't bad enough, I found this hidden in the FAQ: A Firefox referral is counted when a Windows user, who has not previously installed Firefox, downloads and runs the program for the first time. Not sure why they are only paying for Windows users! At any rate, this should help get some additional Firefox users, and that's a good thing.

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–jeremy

Filed under Main Page, Open Source

No Respect for Windows Open Source

November 2, 2005 Leave a comment

I've been meaning to blog about this one for a while now, but I've been putting a good deal of time into the upcoming LQ code update so haven't been blogging much at all. In a recent post, Shaun Walker laments that Windows Open Source apps/programmers get no respect. Let me start out by saying that I am not all that familiar with DotNetNuke, which is the main app in question here. It looks like a nice app and is certainly 100% Open Sourced as it's using a BSD license. It looks like they have created a nice community there, which is always something to applaud. A few zealots aside though, I don't think the problem people have is with Open Source code that runs on Windows. The fact is, Windows has a huge market share and anyone that is dedicating their time to writing an Open Source App should be applauded. Now, writing an Open Source App that only supports Windows seems silly to me, but it's certainly someone's prerogative. What you lose there is choice. Also, one thing you'll notice about Open Source software is that it's often extremely portable. MySQL, Firefox, OpenOffice.org, PHP, etc all run on Windows – but they also run on Linux, OSX, Solaris and a variety of other platforms. Choice is good. The thing I'd guess that DotNetNuke is taking a beating about is that it requires .NET which brings you right back to the vendor lockin that Open Source tries to get you away from. Mono will hopefully change this, but that's not a reality yet. Right now, if you are a PHP developer and Zend and the php.net developers go crazy and do something you don't like you are free to pick up the last Open Source licensed version and go on your merry way. If Microsoft does the same thing with .NET, you as a DotNetNuke developer will be robbed of all your hard work and your entire community of users will be left searching for alternatives. The PHP developer also has a choice of OS and web server, instead of being locked into Windows and IIS. All that being said, in the true spirit of Open Source (as I've said many times now, but will reiterate) choice is good. If you choose to use an encumbered language that locks you and your users into a single company, that is your choice. For what you want to do, it may not even be a bad choice. What matters is if it's a choice you and your users are happy with. Your choice will of course have repercussions and may impact how others choose, but I hope that doesn't translate to a lack of respect. In the end, I'd say ignore the zealots and do what you like to do – write quality Open Source code. If I were one of your users though, MONO support couldn't come fast enough though.
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–jeremy

Filed under Main Page, Microsoft, Open Source

MS To Launch Internet Versions of Office And Windows

November 2, 2005 1 Comment

Has it finally happened? Has Microsoft realized (at an exec level, many non-CEx's there have realized for a while) that the world is changing in a direction that will eventually severely hurt their two cash cows, Windows and Office? It would seem so. Unfortunately, I currently get a Firefox support is coming soon. Please be patient :-) message, but the fact that they even admit that someone may come to the site not using IE is a small step in the right direction. One has to wonder how much the rumors of a “Google Office” along with their recent hiring of OOo developers had to do with this. One also has to wonder how crippled Microsoft will make these online versions, as they are surely not ready to put the two cows out to pasture yet. One very encouraging thing I noticed was that Bill Gates says that data will be able to easily flow in and out of these live offerings. Fantastic. Microsoft really lost most consumer trust long ago, and this would be a good way to start getting it back. It needs to be more than lip service though and whether that will happen remains to be seen. Right now it looks like the bottom tiers of the offerings will be free and ad supported, with paid higher tiers coming soon. It also looks like you can run this online via Microsoft servers or run it on your servers. I'd guess some of the details are still being worked out and they wanted to get this thing out as soon as possible. Scoble says that, while Windows Live just looks like a portal now, there's more to come. Tim seems optimistic about the offering while Russell thinks that Live isn't about Web 2.0 at all, it's all about Monopoly 4.0. These really are interesting times and it looks like we may finally have some competition in spaces we haven't had any on a long time. That's a good thing on all counts, IMHO.
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–jeremy

Filed under Main Page, Microsoft, Open Source

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