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Two weeks ago, HP and Microsoft announced they would jointly spend $250 million to better integrate their hardware and software systems. That's one of the first reactions to Oracle's expected acquisition of Sun Microsystems and its entry into the hardware business. More such alliances are likely to spring out of the ranks of Oracle's competitors.

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After carrying-on for many years an on-again, off-again email-only relationship with Free Software Foundation president and founder Richard Stallman (or "Chief GNU-isance" according to the FSF staff), I finally met him today for a face-to-face interview. While the interview was actually for a larger project we're working on here at InformationWeek, we spent a considerable amount of time talking about the issues he wrestles with every day. One of them is GNU and the highly misguided usage of the term Linux to describe what is really GNU/Linux. Stallman, GNU, and the FSF deserve some credit and we (including distributors such as Red Hat and Novell) should all pay it to them.

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Monty Widenius continues his campaign to save MySQL from falling into Oracle's possession with a script that would have been suitable, perhaps, for the Perils of Pauline. The whole problem with "saving" MySQL at this point is that its most outspoken defenders chose to sell it to Sun, a firm on the brink of collapse.

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For my last blog on open source, I've peered ahead -- inasmuch as anyone in this business can look ahead -- and made a few careful guesses as to what awaits us in both the open source and proprietary worlds.

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The only constant thing is change, and change has come my way. As of the end of 2009, I'll be leaving InformationWeek -- so over the next couple of days I thought I'd sum up a few points gleaned during my time here.

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Open source has a life of its own, to be sure. But without warm bodies in the driver's seat, there's no more going on than with any other program that has no human component.

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Those who egregiously violate open source software licensing agreements, like the GPL, are targets for legal action that's just as vigilant as those that defend proprietary software. But the most recent round of GPL legal action comes with a curious twist.

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Hope you're not tired of buzzwords. After "the network is the computer" and "the cloud", welcome to "data-intensive computing". This time, however, there's far more at work here than a clever turn of phrase.

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That's the essence of the challenges posed by MySQL originator Monty Widenius in his newest blog post about Oracle's ongoing acquisition of Sun and MySQL. His confidence in Oracle to do the right thing remains thin. Very thin.

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IBM's new Linux-based mainframe says a lot about the way a company can make Linux a cornerstone of its business. It's an all-Linux machine, one which might well spell out a high-end strategy for other hardware vendors to follow.

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The Oracle/European Union drama never stops. Now IBM's stuck their collective necks into the fray and said that Oracle's acquisition of Sun should go through if they make some positive open source gestures to all parties. Meaning what exactly, though?

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No one ought to be surprised by the notion that Chrome is Google's big cross-platform play -- a way to get their app-delivery system running everywhere. It's not just a way to soften people up for the arrival of Chrome OS, either.

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That's the thesis behind a piece by Sascha Segan over at PC Magazine, where he blames a good deal of the lack of geek-friendly Linux handsets on the wireless carriers themselves. But how much of it is also end-user indifference?

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Something crossed my desk recently that embodied one of my major criticisms of how open source is promoted. It can't be something that lives in its own alternate universe and follow its own laws of physics -- or economics.

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That's the feeling former MySQL shareholder and strategy adviser (and NoSoftwarePatents.com prime mover) Florian Muller has about Oracle's new peace offering to the European Union over MySQL. It isn't about giving MySQL real autonomy, but putting it in a whole new cage.

Continue reading "Will Sun Pull MySQL's Teeth?..."

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That's one of the many analogies and observations drawn by Vyatta CEO Kelly Herrell in a blog post about the economics of open source. The open source business model is tremendously effective, in his eyes -- it's just that its effects are not always measured in dollar values, and that can drive the money men crazy.

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Readers of this blog know I'm a fan of the PortableApps.com suite of open source programs. Now, its curators have made it that much easier to take your app -- freeware or open source -- and make it a PortableApp.

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Would Google's Chrome OS spell more competition for Android than anything else? That's one of the possibilities looming for Google's browser-centric Linux distro, as on each closer inspection it looks that much less like a Windows killer.

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"Transparency" is a vital term in open source: how easy is it to find out about some aspect of an open source project or product? Matthew Aslett of the 451 CAOS Theory blog went to find out how a number of vendors of open core products stacked up in this regard.

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Among the people Google's partnering with to build Chrome OS, there's now a very familiar name: Canonical, the folks behind Ubuntu. In their words: "Canonical is contributing engineering to Google under contract" (for Chrome OS).

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These days, I can scarcely click a mouse without running headlong into some variety of punditry regarding the imminent death of proprietary software thanks to open source. Sorry, I don't believe proprietary software is digging its inevitable collective grave any more than the sun is about to go nova.

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Shortly before I wrote my post about responsible disclosure of open source licensing violations, Bradley Kuhn (of the Software Freedom Conservancy and Software Freedom Law Center) wrote a post of his own about the same subject. His take: GPL violations are common, everyday things -- and as such should be handled with cool, calm, and collected heads.

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Today Google aired a webcast where they whipped the curtains all the way off Google Chrome OS for the first time. It's about what most people expected: Chrome OS running on top of a thin layer of Linux, designed for netbooks -- and designed for people whose sole computing experience is the web. It's Google's netbook answer to Android.

Continue reading "Google Chrome OS Unveiled: Nothing But The Web..."

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DataSF.org is San Francisco's major foray into open and transparent government; it is the city giving its vital data back to its citizens. We talked with the city's mayor, Gavin Newsom, several members of his technology team, led by CTO Blair Adams, and some of the early developers who have already built applications around the data. We've captured all of this in a new video documentary.

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I've been using Movable Type as my blogging system of choice for several years now -- not just because it's open source but because it's a good program with great features. And yet the newest revision, version 5, feels like it falls far short of what could -- and needs -- to be done.

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Laugh (or cry) if you want. But with each successive release of Android, and with each new iteration of Chrome -- soon to be ChromeOS -- it's looking more and more like Linux's future as any kind of mainstream product is in Google's hands. There's a lesson here.

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Last week brought news about Microsoft inadvertently using open source code in one of their binary-only tools -- code that had to be redistributed with the tool itself. When this does happen, what's the best way to bring such a mistake to an offending company's attention? Is shouting about it far and wide always wise?

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A curious insight has come from all the recent talk about MySQL / Sun / Oracle. People talk about a community around a given open source product, but there's at least as much talk about a team within it. Let's not neglect the importance of either of those things.

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Four days before Microsoft launches its Azure cloud platform to developers at a conference in L.A., Amazon has come up with a .Net software development kit to help Windows developers produce code that runs in Amazon's EC2. It's probably just coincidence. But let's see what they're getting with AWS SDK for .Net.

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Has Microsoft gone one step closer to patenting the words "May I?" That's been the general sentiment about the granting of Microsoft's "Rights elevator" patent -- which would cover User Account Control ("UAC") in Vista and Windows 7, but possibly also the generic sudo command in Unix.

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After news of Google's Go language surfaced, I went to my programmer friend for some additional perspective on Google's new experiment. He wasn't impressed -- and actually, neither was I. We had different reasons.

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What's different about cloud computing versus the forms of computing that have gone before? It's really just a matter of scale, isn't it? The Google or Amazon.com or eBay data centers are maybe a little bigger than a big enterprise data center, right? Wrong. One answer lies in an example like Hadoop.

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Few names in open source are at the level of a household name, but Miguel de Icaza, of Novell's Mono, comes close. Last week I had the good fortune to chat with him for a bit about MonoTools, the new Mono development package for Microsoft Visual Studio -- and about why Mono attracts such bitterness from open source purists.

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After my Thursday column about the litl, readers pointed my attention to a blog post where the folks at litl (all lowercase) further defended their reasons for its rather top-heavy $700 price point. I went in expecting some real meat for discussion. I came away with a nearly empty plate.

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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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