April, 2009

IBM POWER Systems focuses on Linux

In light of the global economic situation, IBM is putting a greater emphasis on the Linux market. This was an obvious shift that I noticed today while attending the COMMON User Group Annual Meeting and Exposition in Reno, Nev. I sat in on a panel discussion with Ian Jarman, IBM’s Power Systems Software Manager, and he plainly stated this fact. Jarman shared the Linux focus of IBM’s recent announcements, including increased focus on the PowerVM Lx86 product, which was created to help combat x86 server sprawl. PowerVM Lx86 creates an x86 Linux application environment running on POWER processor-based systems by dynamically translating x86 instructions to Power Architecture instructions.

On the exhibit hall floor, Anirban Chatterjee, IBM IT Specialist in the Executive Briefing Centers Systems and Technology Group, demonstrated how the tool works along with the PowerVM Live Partitioning Mobility feature.

Jarman also touched on the fact that IBM offers full support for SUSE 11, a move we have reported previously, with a focus on the cloud computing emphasis.

I’ll be keeping my eye on the Linux on Power activities at IBM throughout the show, and we’ll be following up with some end users who are willing to share their experiences. If you have any questions you want to ask IBM about Linux on POWER, leave a note in the comments below and I’ll work on getting you an answer.

Open source community reacts to Oracle-Sun deal

Yesterday’s news that Oracle had entered an agreement to buy Sun sent a bit of a shock wave through the open source community. After weeks of pondering what an IBM buyout of Sun would mean, the IT community now had an entirely different scenario unfolding.

The news was the first thing I noticed when I logged onto Twitter, and I saw that SearchDataCenter.com was working on the story. I “retweeted” Executive Editor Matt Stansberry’s play for feedback and heard back from Tom Howard, who said “IBM missed its chance. I want to know what Oracle’s commitment to Open Office and Solaris are, personally.”

But the bigger fear was from the MySQL folks. Satoshi Nagayasu, an open source database engineer from Tokyo, Japan, asked “Should we say goodbye to MySQL?” He then pointed to a blog from 2005 that was a reaction to Oracle’s purchase of Innobase, and said “Josh’s article gave me some insights why we use community-based open source [PostgreSQL].”

One of the more fun and mood-illustrating reactions was from tartansolutions: “Oracle now owns MySQL?! In related news, the Rebel Alliance has been acquired by Darth Vader for three wookies and a tantan :(“

John Engates, CTO at Rackspace, said “Seems like there’s a lot of concern about Oracle screwing up MySQL. People may look to PostgreSQL as a ‘safe’ open source DB.” He linked to a blog post by Om Malik, providing the GigaOM perspective on the purchase. Of the things Om said, the central point in the concern could be summarized by this paragraph:

At this price, it looks like Oracle found itself yet another bargain and in one fell swoop became a worthy competitor to IBM. It allows Oracle to become a player in the cloud computing business. More importantly, the company ends up acquiring MySQL, the upstart database that has been viewed as Oracle’s Achilles’ heel. In one fell swoop, it has taken out its No. 1 competitor.

Not all in the open source community was doom and gloom though. Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, in his blog post in reaction to the deal looked for a silver lining. Zemlin pointed out that Oracle is strategically aligned with Linux in its position as a Linux distributor, and all its products are developed and run on Linux.

“Oracle is a key supporter of open standards such as ODF and we believe this only strengthens that stance,” said Zemlin. “This acquisition could prove fruitful for Open Office and ODF support in the enterprise.”

I was on the phone for the Canonical Ubuntu 9.04 release press conference, and one of the participants asked Canonical CEO, Mark Shuttleworth, what his reaction was, specifically regarding Java support.

“It is far too early to tell,” said Shuttleworth. “Java has been open, it tends to be a one-way trip – once you’ve made that commitment it makes sense to have it as highly available as possible.”

Shuttleworth also saw the move as a bit of further evidence of the worth of open source in the enterprise software industry.

“This really cements that free software and open source is the driving force today,” he said. “All of the major forces today are either free software or powered by free software — Java, Google, and onward. The software marketplace is consolidating at an extraordinary pace. Part of the reason for that is that open source is dominating the innovation pipeline. The fact that one of those five has just announced a $7 billion acquisition of a company that describes itself as the world’s biggest free and opens source software company proves that open source is the big game in town.”

Lastly, analyst Dana Gardener painted what I feel is the most level-headed picture of what the whole deal means.

Suffice to say that whatever momentum Sun had behind open source everywhere will be muted to open source some times as a ramp to other Oracle stuff, or to grow the community and keep developers happy. If nothing else, Oracle has been pragmatic on open source, not religious.

What do you think this means for open source? Are you considering moving to PostgreSQL if you weren’t already? Are you a programmer worried about Java support? Share your thoughts in the comments

More analysis from TechTarget:
Oracle-Sun combo: What does it mean for enterprise Java?

Will Sun help Oracle eclipse IBM?

VARs turn wary eye on Sun-Oracle combo

Oracle-Sun: A threat to VMware?

Ubuntu 9.04 release focus on user experience and data center needs

Canonical, the sponsor of Ubuntu, today announced the simultaneous release of Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition and the Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition, available for download on Thursday, April 23, 2009, and the Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix, available on Thursday April 30, 2009.

With the new 9.04 server edition, Canonical has worked to extend the range of enabled servers, with 45 of the most popular mid-range servers from IBM, Dell and Sun and HP tested in the Canonical labs.
Ubuntu 9.04 Server edition will preview Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC). Ubuntu is the first commercially-supported distribution to enable businesses to build cloud environments inside their firewalls. With Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition, organizations can explore the benefits of cloud computing without the data or security issues associated with moving data to an external cloud provider. Following a successful beta program, Ubuntu Server Edition 9.04 will also be fully available on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Mark Shuttleworth, CEO, Canonical shared some of the server improvements in Ubuntu 9.04 Server edition include substantial improvements in some key applications for mail and other common infrastructure requirements.

“There has been an extension of work around suspend and resume of servers,” said Shuttleworth. “Amazon’s EC2 elastic computing meme will penetrate deeply into the enterprise. And organizations will want that same elastic computing internally, along with the power saving capability. The best method is suspending or resuming. Through effective use of elastic computing, we think we can greatly improve the energy savings in the data center.”

Shuttleworth referred to the concept of cloud computing as “the new hotness,” and says that Canonical has chosen to give it a very specific focus in this release. An image of Ubuntu 9.04 is now on EC2, so anyone interested in prototyping on Ubuntu 9.04 can fire it up on EC2. Shuttleworth shared that Canonical has a firm commitment to continue to release updates in the cloud. A description of other Ubuntu virtualization efforts and a more detailed report on the current position of Ubuntu in the data center and enterprise IT environment was published on SearchDataCenter.com at the beginning of April.

Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition improves user experience
Mark Zimmerman, CTO, Canonical explained some of the new features in Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition include a reduction in start-up time from 45 seconds to 25 seconds. According to Zimmerman, the release also includes an improved notification subsystem, which is the first in a series of design-led improvements.

“We are really working on improving the intrinsic experience of using Ubuntu on the desktop,” explained Zimmerman. “The notification subsystem has a standardized way of displaying [notices], that adds to the polished feel of the desktop.”

In addition, the desktop version of Ubuntu 9.04 features OpenOffice.org 3.0. This release of OpenOffice includes a lot of compatibility between Microsoft Office suite products that can make the user experience more seamless and easy, and wasn’t available at the last Ubuntu Desktop Edition release.

Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit wrap-up

The 3rd Annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit was held last week in San Francisco. Among the talks was a presentation by Al Gillen, program vice president, system software at IDC, titled “The Opportunity for Linux in a New Economy.” The presentation was based on a white paper, sponsored by The Linux Foundation (LF), which looks at the impact of the current economic conditions on the computer industry, and how the Linux ecosystem will ride through this disruptive time. The presentation focused on IDCs expectation that the Linux ecosystem will be less impacted by the downturn and recover more aggressively than other platforms.

Other keynotes and panels during the week were from Linux kernel developers and representatives at IBM, Novell and Red Hat, among others. Thursday and Friday’s agenda included the ISV Summit, which focused on sharing the latest advancements in Linux and looking at best ways to work among the community. Other panel discussions and workgroup focus was on high-performance computing, file systems and systems management, among others.

We’re Linux video contest winner announced
The winner of the “We’re Linux” video contest was also announced at the summit. Amitay Tweeto, a 25-year-old graphic designer from Israel, beat out 90 contest entrants to win the grand prize for his video “What Does It Mean To Be Free?” Tweeto will receive a trip to Tokyo, Japan to participate in the Linux Foundation’s Japanese Linux Symposium in October 2009.

Two runner-ups were also announced:

• Runner-up: “The Origin”
• Runner-up: “Linux Pub”

A combination of community votes and a panel of judges determined the winners:

• Matt Asay, CNET blogger and executive at Alfresco, Inc.;
• Larry Augustin, venture capitalist and former chairman of VA Software,
  and Linux Foundation board member;

• Jono Bacon, Ubuntu community manager;
• Joe Brockmeier, openSUSE community manager;
• Melinda Mettler, director, School of Advertising at the Academy of Art
  University; and

• Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO, O’Reilly Media, Inc.

openSUSE Build Service added to Linux Developer Network
On Wednesday, Novell and the Linux Foundation jointly announced that the openSUSE Build Service will be added to the Linux Developer Network (LDN). The openSUSE Build Service enables developers to package software for all major Linux distributions, and is used to provide transparent infrastructure for the creation of the entire openSUSE distribution. Additionally, the openSUSE Project, a Novell sponsored and community-supported open source project, announced a new release of the openSUSE Build Service with support for compiling for the ARM platform.

The Linux Foundation will be providing an interface to the openSUSE Build Service via the Linux Developer Network site, so that developers can create packages for all major Linux distributions via LDN. The build service enables developers to create packages for CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu, in addition to openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise. The addition of the openSUSE Build Service to the LDN compliments LDN’s popular AppChecker application, which enables developers to create portable applications for Linux. The build service is a perfect tool for LDN’s overall goal of assisting developers to deliver these portable applications.

The openSUSE project is also releasing the 1.6 version of the build service that includes support for compiling packages for the ARM platform, which is primarily used for embedded devices. The support for cross-architecture build support means that developers can create RPM or Debian packages for openSUSE, Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora. This work has been contributed by 5e DataSoft GmbH, working as part of the openSUSE community to add support for embedded devices based on ARM. 5e provides solutions based on openSUSE.

The latest release of the build service also includes support for building openSUSE appliances, live CDs, installable USB images, Xen images and VMware images. Developers can now create their own custom openSUSE distribution using the build service.

Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier, openSUSE community manager, said, “This is the culmination of years of work by the openSUSE Project. The openSUSE Build Service has always been intended as a tool that would accelerate the general adoption of Linux. It’s gratifying to see the build service becoming part of the Linux Developer Network and being embraced by the larger community.”