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In this edition: two ways to browse the web, and one great way to find everything scattered across all your storage media. Read on.

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A Boston-based startup named Litl is taking a big risk: they're betting people will go for a netbook that sports a Linux-based OS and focuses on Web-/network-based productivity (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). The risk is in the pricetag: $700 -- almost twice the price of computers that can do twice as much. Is there a market for this?

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As my colleague Alex Wolfe noted, Linux hasn't made a dent in the desktop after years in the wild. The climb looks all the steeper now that Windows 7 and new versions of Mac OS X have arrived. I can think of a few other reasons why Linux hasn't achieved more than a fractional marketshare with end users, and they aren't pretty. (I've already donned my asbestos suit.)

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Oracle's acquisition of Sun is still grinding along, but while the gears are still turning I'd like to throw in a request: Make OpenOffice an open-core product. Keep the main program free, but charge for the useful bonuses.

Continue reading "OpenOffice: Go Open Core..."

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Even Linux's advocates are unthrilled at one of its sticking points: binaries built for one breed of Linux don't always run on another. And since unifying Linux into a common distribution is about as likely as herding a circus ring full of cats into a clown car, people who want to distribute prebuilt binaries for Linux have few choices. Here's a new choice: FatELF, or universal binaries for Linux.

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Amazon's newest cloud offering: MySQL 5.1 in the cloud, also known as Amazon RDS. And there's worry that it'll turn out to be a bad thing for MySQL in the long run, although that might not hold true for other open source repurposed in the same way.

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How'd you like to never have to reboot a Linux box again -- no, not even if you have to apply a kernel-level patch? That's the promise of Ksplice, a software technology for Linux (and maybe soon other platforms) designed to allow a system to be patched from the kernel level on up without having to be restarted. It's available right now for Ubuntu, and from what I can see, it's not digital snake oil.

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Open source in the government and military isn't a new thing; governance is one of open source's biggest target markets, so to speak. It's still all the more heartening to hear the Department of Defense come out strongly in favor of open source, and to recommend using more of it whenever possible.

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Yesterday Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth held a phone conference to talk about the state of Ubuntu. It's clearly become more than just "Linux for human beings". But it's getting harder to avoid thinking of Canonical as a black box, and that hurts.

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In a startling move, a favorite platform of mine for delivering no-install open source applications on Windows has thrown open the doors to adding freeware -- non-open source apps -- to their collection. Did the planets fall out of alignment when I wasn't looking?

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It does sound like a setup for a joke, doesn't it? What was I, the Open Source Guy, doing at Microsoft's gala Windows 7 launch party in New York City yesterday? A colleague of mine pointed this out, and I joshed back that I felt like the only guy in a corduroy suit at a black-tie ball. Actually, my first jolt of perspective came before I even stood on line for my badge.

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Fedora 12's public beta is now out -- what timing, right? -- and while a cursory glance at the feature list as a whole doesn't sport anything revolutionary, there's more than a few goodies worth singling out.

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What's the first thing you should do if you're thinking of developing software for cloud computing? At ZendCon, Zend Technologies user group yesterday, three members of a five member panel answered the same way: adopt Simple Cloud API, the open source cloud services interface.

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Most of the comments about IBM's release of a Linux desktop package have been about timing it to compete with Windows 7's release. Let's look at a slightly broader picture.

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Just when you think the saga of SCO can't get any weirder, it does. The SCO Group announced in the last few days it was firing Darl McBride, but also "restructuring" and also "looking to raise additional funding and sell non-core assets to bolster working capital." To which I can only add: What non-core assets?

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Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols's (in?)famous "Five Ways The Linux Desktop Shoots Itself In The Foot" has generated as much heat as it has light. I feel I can boil all five of his points down to one simple exhortation. Dear Linux community: Stop blaming other people for your own failings.

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Scarcely a week goes by without some criticism or analysis of open source licensing, and this time around it's whether or not the GPLv2's "legally ambiguous".

Continue reading "GPLv2 Ambiguities Linger On..."

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The big question many people ask themselves about open source is: "How do we monetize this?" The real question should be: "What are we really selling?" Answer: Brainpower.

Continue reading "Don't 'Sell Open Source' - Sell Brainpower..."

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On Tuesday afternoon I spoke with Ivanka Majic, leader of Canonical's design team for Ubuntu Desktop and Netbook Remix. She's spearheading the effort to make Ubuntu that much more appealing and useful -- to make it more of its "Linux for human beings" namesake.

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I goofed a bit in my previous blog about open core / open source licensing. As always, the details are full of devils -- but that afforded a chance to bring some more thought to the table.

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A new open source project called Swarm bills itself as "a transparently scalable distributed programming language." It's been written to tackle one of the thorniest problems of today's cloud-centric world: How do you create applications that can scale up and out without driving yourself nuts?

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Ealier in the week the CAOS Theory blog of the 451 Group noted there were three, or actually four, ways you could handle "open core" licensing -- where the basic version of your product is free, but the add-ons and support and such are not. Everyone will (and should) do these things differently, and the details are full of devils.

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Savio Rodrigues just wrote about a colleague testing a bunch of browsers based on the open source WebKit rendering engine. To his dismay, "no two are exactly the same". Or, as he put it, "A WebKit-based browser is, well, whatever the vendor wants it to be."

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Newspapers are either a dying breed or a changing breed, depending on who you talk to. The New York Times wants to adapt, not go extinct, and one of the little ways they're adapting involves a software tool they're releasing as an open-source application for their fellow news organizations -- or anyone else, really.

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In one week, Red Hat's asked the Supreme Court to do away with software patents, while Eolas prepares to sue just about everyone on the planet with "fully interactive embedded applications" on their websites. I hate that it's become harder to tell who has the most legitimate grievances.

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Over the weekend I got into a heated discussion sparked by some of the things I'd asserted in a previous column about open source vs. free software. Out of that discussion came another, similar idea: Most people don't distinguish between kinds of free, and maybe it's unfair to expect them to.

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The best comment I've heard about Google Wave so far: "Wave is simultaneously less and more than I'd hoped." Me, I already have plans on the table to set up my own Wave server: my personal "Wave 1.1", as it were. Or even Wave 2.0.

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The advocates of free software -- not just open source, but free as in freedom -- talk about the use of computers as a basic human right. It probably is. But I see freedom as a direction to lean into, rather than a specific path or goal to be obtained.

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Here is a radical suggestion to fund the development of newly-emergent open source OS platforms: Keep the platform and as much of the other software on it free. Sell the development tools.

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Back when Sam Ramji announced he was leaving his position at Microsoft as director of their open source operations, I shot a couple of questions his way. He was on vacation at the time, but now he's back and has a lot to talk about -- about Microsoft, about open source, and about the two in combination.

Continue reading "Q&A With A Post-Microsoft Sam Ramji..."

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If Linux doesn't change its attitude about prepackaged binary (read: closed source) software anytime soon, here's a suggestion: a generic software deployment system for Linux binaries.

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After my post about the GPL's day in court in France, a programmer friend noted he no longer used the GPL for anything, now that its instigator, the Free Software Foundation, has (in his view) gone off a cliff. Do other people see the GPL as tainted because of the FSF's rather stentorian views?

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What's notable about the open source project announced yesterday, Simple API for cloud computing, are the names that are present, IBM, Microsoft and Rackspace, and the names that are not: Amazon, for one, is not a backer, and let's just stop right there.

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Another test of whether open source licensing is enforceable in court has come. A French firm was taken to court for redistributing GPL-ed software minus its licensing and copyright information -- a big no-no.

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Over the last week I've been either tracking or actively beta-testing several open source projects which are worth a quick rundown here. Read on for more.

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If Linus Torvalds himself is saying that the Linux kernel is bloated, something's wrong. Or is it just a matter of expectations and perspective?

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Last week I wrote about an open source utility with an interface that I thought needed work; commenters on the article slammed me for being critical. Sorry, I don't think free software and open source has a future in a world where it's somehow immune from criticism because it's free.

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Earlier this week I talked about Haiku OS's alpha 1 release (not beta, my mistake!), and thought I'd dig past the FAQ and get answers to some of my own questions about this remarkable new, free-and-open OS that's aimed squarely at the desktop.

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Last night I migrated a Windows 7 box to a new 1 terabyte drive, thanks to an open source tool named Clonezilla. It was a success, but the whole time I kept saying to myself the same thing again and again: "Wow, this program is ugly."

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Sam Ramji, Microsoft's credible open source spokesman, is leaving to join a startup and return with his family to the San Francisco Bay area. All Microsoft has to do is find a replacement. Ramji tried to push a mighty boulder up the mountain and got it at least to the first ledge. How will his successor fare?

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There's a hard truth to be learned about making most computer users care about open source: they won't care. But that's the beginning of wisdom, not the end of it.

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When The Register ran news of a "Linux botnet" out in the wild, the bloviation did fly: See? Linux really isn't that secure! But odds are this has nothing to do with Linux security per se, and everything to do with the biggest and most notorious security hole of all: bad system administration.

After years of quiet but steady development, Haiku OS finally has its first public alpha. Here comes a new competitor for the desktop -- not just with Windows or OS X, but Linux,too.

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What's this? Microsoft forming its own open source foundation? Apparently, yes.

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Here is a question which has been bothering me for some time now, and which doesn't stand much of a chance of resolving itself. Is comparing the much-vaunted security benefits of open source software to similar proprietary apps a false comparison?

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The title says it all: the Open Invention Network, an open source coalition "formed to promote Linux by using patents to create a collaborative environment", has grabbed up a few of Microsoft's patents.

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Which is worse: losing a visionary, or losing the people who make visions possible? The ongoing drama of Sun's acquisition by Oracle may tell us.

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Here's further proof there really is a Linux distribution for every need out there: Scientific Linux. The name alone should speak volumes about its intent and design, but as always there's more under the hood.

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After long and careful consideration, and with a deadline looming, I chose to opt out of the Google Books settlement. Sorry, Google, this time you were evil.

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Linux is always looking for new markets, and now it might have one via the ultra-small notebook space: Japan.

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