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Good news: Asus is about to unveil its next generation of Eee PC mininotebooks in both Windows XP and Linux editions, and they look downright snazzy.  Bad news for folks down under: The Linux version of the new Eee is more expensive in Australia.  What!?

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What do future generations think about the state of Java and its relevance to their research? The answer may surprise you, and Sun.

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I had an interesting discussion with John Newton, the co-founder of Alfresco, recently. I'm a little star-struck by this guy. It's hard to get much higher on the food chain when you look at Newton's credentials. Not only did he co-found Documentum, he's also less than five years into the launch of Alfresco, arguably one of the biggest disrupters to appear on the enterprise software radar in years.

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The official word from Kaj Arnö of MySQL / Sun is out: Portions of MySQL that were originally being considered as closed-source components will now be open source as well.  Good news, bad news, or none of the above?  I take the third view.  The real issue is, again, not open vs. closed code, but how you engage the open source community -- how you clue them in to what kind of company you are.

Continue reading "On MySQL's About-Face: It's About Expectations..."

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Any talk of Linux brings with it talk of what it will take to get Linux on the desktop in big numbers.  Much of the talk in this vein revolves around distribution X versus desktop Y, or something of that nature.  The real issue, though, may not be a particular distribution or package model, but the mind-set of the creators.

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OpenSolaris, Sun's open-source version of its Solaris operating system, gets its official kickoff today at Sun's CommunityOne conference in San Francisco.  And it's not Sun's attempt to knock Linux out of the box -- it's something a little subtler than that.

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So Neil Young is apparently going to perform at JavaOne next week, where he's expected to belt out his Keep on Rockin' in the Free World anthem. Hey, hey. My, my. Will the encore be Needle and the Damage Done?

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There are times when the jokes just seem to tell themselves.  Yesterday, during testimony for Novell's lawsuit against SCO to determine how much Novell was owed for its ownership of the Unix copyrights, none other than Darl McBride took the stand and said two things that will no doubt become fodder for .SIG files from here to eternity.

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One of our contacts in the PR world sent over some thoughts after reading our continuing discussion about why content management companies fail. His remarks might not be terribly surprising for those of you that live and breathe content management, but they warrant a re-visit.

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Two major announcements in the past day or so both caught my attention: the inclusion of an open source version of Java with Linux, and an effort on Adobe's part to open up the proprietary nature of Flash.  Both are potentially huge, and they both cover about as much territory as they overlap.

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In my post the other day about whether or not work in the ReiserFS file system would continue after Hans Reiser's murder conviction, I mentioned that this being an open source project, it wouldn't be hard for someone else to pick up where others leave off.  And as it turns out, that's precisely what's happening: according to folks on the ReiserFS team, work on ReiserFS will continue.

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After three days of deliberation and six months of testimony, a jury found Hans Reiser, creator of the ReiserFS file system for Linux, guilty of first-degree murder. There's no end of commentary about the trial itself, but now that the verdict is in, I thought I'd contemplate a related issue: What happens to an open source project when one of its main instigators suffers calamity?

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Today I spoke with Tom Kemp, CEO of Centrify, creator of that remarkable patent-to-protocol map that I wrote about last week. My first question: why create such a thing? His answer: "Just the facts," and we went from that into a discussion of how open source and open standards suited his company and the market as a whole.

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Leading off this installment of The Weekly Watch is Alfresco, a company that's proven there's plenty of innovation left in the enterprise content management (ECM) sector. Alfresco sent InformationWeek some of its recent accomplishments and a few grabbed our attention.

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The hardest part about open source isn't the code -- it's the community.  Examples of this come up all the time, with Sun being one that has come up a good deal lately -- not just because of its acquisition of MySQL (which I'm still fairly positive about), but the way perceptions of its behavior can affect its acceptance.  Even if you do the right thing, it needs to also look like you're doing the right thing. 

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Microsoft's whole Catch-22 of Linux infringing on certain patents claimed by them has gone on long enough.  We all know this -- but barring some major (and I do mean major) changes on Microsoft's side, it's looking fairly futile to expect them to come out and say what the infringing patents are.  Time to bring in some third-party muscle, and that's what Tom Kemp of Centrify has just attempted to do.

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Looks like the OLPC project, much vaunted for its use of open source to bring commodity computing to developing nations, is about to become yet another Microsoft-by-default domain.  In an AP article, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte talked about how the OLPC's XO notebook ought to soon be available as a dual-boot with either Linux or a cut-down version of Windows XP ... and maybe someday become an XP-only machine.  Ugh.

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Word has been circulating about a Standish Group research report that's apparently guaranteed to turn heads.  "Free Open Source Software Is Costing Vendors $60 Billion" is apparently one of the claims made in this report, titled "Trends in Open Source," and while I haven't been able to get my hands on it, the press blurbs about it make me wonder what really is the best way to quantify open source adoption.  Talking about it as "lost" revenue doesn't seem to make much sense.

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When mention of Ubuntu -- or Linux in general -- makes it into mainstream media, it's always worth reading about, if only to see how badly they mangle it.  The latest bit of blurbage from the BBC (or "Beeb", as some are wont to call it), a thumbnail rundown of Mark Shuttleworth's work with Ubuntu and the progress of that particular Linux distro, won't be earth-shattering news to the existing open source faithful.  But it's yet another sign that Linux is finally out of the tech-geek closet and making strong inroads towards becoming a brand name of sorts.

Continue reading "Shuttleworth's Case For Linux..."

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Is it really the worst thing in the world if Red Hat doesn't want to make a consumer-grade desktop Linux distribution?  I don't think so.  With all the things Red Hat already does so well, it's not as if it's missing out -- and if other people already are hard at work on that project, Red Hat still won't be missing out.  This is open source, remember?

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When MySQL / Sun announced the other day that some advanced features of future versions of MySQL would only be made available in the enterprise (read: for-pay) edition of the product, people began fulminating openly about Sun's commitment to open source.  The MySQL situation itself isn't anywhere nearly as dire as it might sound, but that doesn't make people bristle any less.

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Just how much open source software are people using?  Getting hard numbers about open source usage is one of those tough-to-crack problems that doesn't seem to have a definitive solution -- partly because of the nature of open source itself.  Self-reporting seems to be about the only way to get any numbers at all, unreliable and biased as that may be.  But if self-reporting open source usage is made as easy as a couple of mouse clicks, why not do it?

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How scared is Microsoft of Linux?  There's a hint or two of its fear in the fact that MS is preparing a special slim-and-trim version of Windows XP, within the next month or two, to run specifically on Asus's Eee PC.  You'd think maybe it could have done this slimming-down sooner -- something that Linux already does without breaking a sweat.

Remember OpenMoko, the makers of the Neo 1973 handset that runs Linux and is designed from the ground-up to be a hacker's and customizer's paradise?  They're back again with more tinkerer's delights: the FreeRunner.  They've also learned a few things from their experiences with marketing and developing the Neo -- not just hardware and software, but how to sell something this unusual.

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Seems like everyone's getting into the low-end notebook market these days.  Hewlett-Packard is the newest of the bunch to step up to the plate with its VIA-driven HP 2133 Mini-Note, a nifty-looking machine that clocks in at $499 for a Linux edition.  A little pricier than the ASUS Eee, but it looks like low-cost computing is one niche for Linux to derive wider market penetration.

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Time for some open source news from a place where such a thing ought to be an oxymoron: Microsoft.  Sam Ramji, who used to head up Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab, has been promoted to the head of that company's worldwide open source / Linux operations team.  Great, but what will it really mean for MS's stance on open source?

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Slowly, more and more hardware manufacturers are getting clued-in on the idea that open source drivers will help both them and their customers.  Now VIA's stepping up to start offering driver source code for many of their current chipsets.  Pop the champagne!

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After Amazon EC2's service went online, I waited for other companies to follow suit with similar ideas.  Now it looks like Google is about to take a stab at the same idea in their own way with the Google App Engine -- and from the look of it, the App Engine might be the more immediately accessible of the two.  It's for coders, not coders who now have to moonlight as sysadmins.

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How'd you like to try out the ASUS Eee without paying a dime, sort of?  ASUS just posted the software development kit for its groundbreaking Linux-powered notebook on SourceForge, along with a fully functional system image of the Eee's Xandros OS.  It's not quite the same experience as the machine itself, but for those itching to develop for it, this is a way to get a jump-start on that without needing the hardware itself.

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You've probably read Mitch Wagner's post extolling the virtues of the just-released Firefox 3 Beta 5.  I've had experiences that are no less grand than his, albeit with one little exception that illustrates the hazards of beta-to-beta upgrades.

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First, there was Sun and MySQL AB.  Now, Sun wants to build stronger ties with another open source player, one that might be even more visible and politically advantageous: Ubuntu.

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Mozilla introduced Firefox 3 Beta 5 on Wednesday, with more than 750 changes from the previous beta, including improved stability and Web compatibility, user interface enhancements, performance improvements, and better integration with Windows, the Mac, and Linux.

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A big buzzword with open source is that you have that many more choices available to you, and Choice, as we all know, is a Good Thing.  The problem is that too much choice is as bad as no choice at all -- especially when it's not clear what the consequences of those choices are.

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After my earlier comments about support for open source apps I went hunting for some other perspectives on the subject and happened across the FOSSBazaar site (a corporate-sponsored "gathering place to discuss, explore, share experiences and cooperatively solve issues related to FOSS governance").  One post in particular that caught my eye: "Not enough support? No, too many support choices!"  I'm thinking it's not just a case of more, but better.

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So now that Ubuntu Linux was "last man standing" in the PWN to OWN contest at CanSecWest, does this mean open source has it all over the competition when it comes to security?  It can, and it ought to -- but it's not a guarantee.  And we need to not think it is.

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At the 2008 edition of the PWN to OWN security showdown at CanSecWest (Canada Security West) in Vancouver, an Ubuntu distribution of GNU Linux took top honors after Apple’s Mac OS X and Microsoft’s Windows Vista eventually caved under hacker pressure. All OSes were up-to-date with the latest patches.

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So what's new in the world of open source apps you can really use?  Among other things, we have a new edition of OpenOffice, a Linux-based system-rescue utility, and a portable edition of an open source financial management application.  Read on ...

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With all the activity in the content management market, I thought it would be a good idea to start a weekly ritual of quick blurbs and sound bites from vendors, users, and anyone else who'd like to throw their message in the mix.

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It's bad enough that Microsoft with its big war chest might sue you for producing open source software. But what's really hard to take is the suggestion that you stooped to stealing Microsoft code for your project. At the Open Source Business Conference this week in San Francisco, one show organizer got his revenge.

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Every now and then you run across something that just makes complete sense.  That happened to me earlier in the week when I was reading posts in Movable Type developer Tim Appnel's blog, and I came across an entry entitled "Open Source Is Not Just A License."  It sums up, in a remarkably succinct fashion, two of the major benefits of taking a closed- or restricted-source project and making it into a more open-source one.

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Some of open source's biggest proponents were probably gloating this week over some results from North Bridge Venture Partners' annual open source survey (PDF). Most of the findings weren't terribly prophetic, but there were a few that caught my eye.

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Reading about Microsoft counsel Brad Smith's visit to the Open Source Business Conference yesterday was about what you'd expect.  It's a sign that Microsoft's stance about open source has not so much evolved as crystallized -- but that's unfortunately about the limit of what I could see Microsoft doing.  It can only go so far, not just because of who it is but who it has been all along.

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Social networks are all the rage right now, so what's one more to add to the fun?  How about a brand-new social networking site devoted to connecting users and creators of open source?  Enter Ohloh.

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There's a lot of interesting scenarios these days around the intersection of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and content management. Thanks to companies like Google, Salesforce.com, and Amazon, cloud-based computing is no longer some mythical, business-led, revolutionary approach to accessing technology. Everyday, mission-critical applications are being neatly packaged and delivered to business users regardless of time, place, or device.

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What I enjoy most about open source is when people take existing products and twist them around into new shapes.  I've long had high regards for PortableApps for doing that, but thanks to a commenter on a previous post of mine, I now have a new crew to watch in that regard: BitNami.

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There's been a lot of discussion about which open source application works best as a replacement for Microsoft Outlook: Evolution, Ximian, Thunderbird, and so on. Let's add another contender to that list, shall we? Meet Spicebird, currently in beta 0.4 form.

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Last year, word swirled in the air that Hewlett-Packard would be the next big PC vendor after Dell to add support for Linux on desktops.  So far the official word remains muted, in the realm of "we're exploring options, we'll make an announcement when the time is right", but the guesses now center around HP providing SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop as its distro of choice.  The real question isn't what distribution, though -- it's what kind of support options you'll get, or as they say, which throat to choke when things break.

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I've been curious about the way Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, can be used to create SaaS applications.  This week I spoke to the folks at Morph Labs, who're doing exactly that using an open source software stack.  If the idea of using EC2 sounded intriguing but you blanched at the idea of trying to work directly with it, these guys have one way to fix that.

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Now that the recent lawsuit against Verizon by a couple of open source developers has been settled, it's become clear -- as some people suspected -- that the real offender here wasn't Verizon per se but a subcontractor, Actiontec.  I wonder if this will mean a new level scrutiny or contractual stipulations for the way subcontractors are hired to do this kind of work -- with one of the possible stipulations being "no open source," especially if litigation is a serious risk.

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So far all the talk about Google's Android has been about phones.  But the more I think about it, the more I realize phones may just be the tip of a very large iceberg that Google is trying to conquer.  Why stop at phones?

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