Open source applications

Open source to shine despite dim economy

In the final hours of 2008, Roger Burkhardt, president and CEO of Ingres, shared his predictions about the future of open source.

Here are summaries of his predictions:

1. As the economy worsens, adoption of open source software will increase .
2. Open source adoption will accelerate across the full infrastructure software stack and into applications.
3. SaaS and cloud computing solutions will grow and pull open source with it.
4. Mergers and acquisitions of open source vendors will continue.
5. Competition from open source will drive proprietary software vendors to take the first steps in changing their business models.
6. Open source stacks will emerge from strong market partnerships.
7. Systems integrators will guarantee first-year cost savings for migrations to open source.

For the most part, I’m with him. As budgets tighten, it only makes sense that “free” will flourish. We hear that consumers are only looking for sales these days, so why wouldn’t companies? With this increase generally, and as more acceptance and trust of open source occurs, it seems natural that it will extend through the stack and through more applications (e.g., Vyatta has been busy releasing three open source networking appliances in 2008). And perhaps the upside of a down job market is that some programmers, with free time on their hands, can finish projects they had on the back burner. In 2008, we heard a lot of buzz about the cloud, and this cost-conscious computing model pairs well with open source. If you buy the cloud hype, you can easily see the increased opportunity for open source adoption that it provides.

We know that open source gained ground in the enterprise, and we even saw major proprietary software vendors change their tune (if not their business models) — ceding some ground to open source devotees.

What are your predictions for open source? Share them below or make your case against Burkhardt’s divinations.

Celebrating the holidays with Linux

This week I went and picked up two ornaments from my local “Giving Tree,” did some shopping, and returned some gifts to be distributed to children in need. This is the third year that I’ve participated in this community giving project, and this year I noticed that the tree was absolutely covered with ornaments for needy children. In these tough economic times, I think it’s important to help out our communities if we are able. We’ve reported that Red Hat has donated the money for the company party to a local food bank. And employees at mobile phone company Funambol have organized a food drive. Whether you’re ready or not (and whether you’ve been good or bad this year), the holiday season is here! I found some stories and ideas about how you might make the most of it this year from the Linux community.

Just in time for the holidays, HP released it’s preinstalled SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10 SP2 on its HP Compaq dc5850. (I wonder if the name SLED is a coincidence, or if they held off the release to get it out with the snowy weather?) Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has already been reviewing SLED 10 SP2 on his blog, noting that the main improvements surround interoperability with Microsoft. He shares that the new version of SLED supports read and write access to local NTFS drive partitions and has better active directory integration. Vaughn-Nichols installed SLED and encountered a few kinks — a hassle that can be avoided in HP’s preinstalled offering.

But if all of that sounds too practical, or dare I say too boring, fear not — Ken Hess has provided a Linux geek wish list for the 2008 holiday season.You may already have a Linux mobile phone, but do you have a Chumby? Hess points out that all of these gadgets have Linux inside. What more could you want?

1. Asus Eee PC
2. Chumby
3. MusicPal
4. LimeBook
5. Linux-based phones
6. Amazon Kindle
7. MVIX MX-760HD
8. Garmin Nuvi880
9. Nokia N810
10. TiVo

But if you don’t want to spend a bunch of dough, Matt Hartley provides some ideas of “homemade” items that you can give your family and friends by putting your Linux skills to use.

… by utilizing your existing computer system, chances are you already have access to what you need to build a really great gaming rig, with the right open source videos games. Enter PlayDeb for Ubuntu. Whether you download each game individually or opt to give the “gift of plenty” all at once, there are more games here than most people would likely have ever imagined.

From Second Life to a number of very well done first-person shooters, even 3D strategy games, just about anything you might conceive of is available here — at no cost whatsoever.

Hartley also suggests updating an unused notebook and giving the gift of Internet, anywhere, to a loved one. Or spread the joy to your community and give “an off-lease or even totally used PC preloaded with Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuSE or PCLinuxOS.”

SUSE Linux is growth engine for Novell

Linux is alive and well at Novell Inc.

In its year-end fiscal report yesterday, the Waltham, Mass.-based company reported that open source products, primarily Linux, rose $34.8 million or 37% to $128.8 million in 2008. Fourth-quarter open source revenues rose just a whisker less or 36.1% to $35.7 million.

The increases far outstripped Novell’s other three product divisions, which are identity and security management, systems and resource management, and its workgroup division.

For the 2008 fiscal year, Novell’s total revenues were $957 million, compared with $932 million in 2007, and its net annual loss was $9 million in 2008, compared with a net loss of $44 million the previous year.

Thanks to aggressive pricing and key partnerships with companies such as Microsoft and SAP, the company’s Linux growth rates far exceeded the 22% increase in the overall Linux market, said Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian. SUSE Linux Enterprise, which grew its market share an additional 3% in 2007, added 3,000 new Linux customers this year, including many large enterprises, he said.

Hovsepian added that Microsoft has sold $195 million of the $240 million in SUSE Linux certificates it bought as part of the 2006 pact between the two companies and has purchased an additional $25 million so far this year, Hovsepian said. In 2008, Novell also has increased its independent software vendor agreements significantly, he added.

Discussing the company as a whole, Hovsepian said Novell has made great progress over the past two years, achieved all its milestones for 2008 and, in turn, stabilized and strengthened the company. While acknowledging that the current uncertain economic climate doesn’t lend to detailed forecasts, Hovsepian said Novell will continue to strive for operational improvement and long-term profitability.

Red Hat donates holiday party money to feed the poor

Despite a year of enviable revenue growth, Red Hat Inc. will not be throwing its customary all-out holiday bash this year. Due to concerns about ostentatious spending during an economic downturn, the Raleigh. N.C. software company decided to host a low-key office gathering instead of the lavish affair originally scheduled at the Raleigh Convention Center. As part of the North Carolina’s high-tech Research Triangle, Raleigh appears to be faring better than many regions but, according to news accounts, the city still has residents who are hurting financially due to the national fiscal turmoil.

Therefore, Red Hat decided to donate the money it would have spent on its annual party to charity. Following the results of an employee poll, Red Hat will send the funds to Chicago, Ill.-based Feeding America, a national organization that funds more than 200 food banks, including several in North Carolina.

Although Red Hat declined to reveal the amount of its donation, the company said the funds were enough to pay for 800,000 meals by Feeding America or 1 million pounds of food and grocery products, a Red Hat spokeswoman said.

In addition, Red Hat offices in Raleigh as well as Westford, Mass., are organizing canned food drives for the hungry; Raleigh executives have pledged a donation for every 500 cans donated at its headquarters office.

“We just felt it was the wrong time to be spending a lot of money on ourselves,” DeLisa Alexander, Red Hat’s senior vice president for people and band, told the Raleigh News & Observer. “I don’t see us going back [to big parties]. People want to work for a company that is socially responsible.”

Novell hurts itself with Red Hat swipe

In an obvious swipe at its larger rival, Waltham, Mass.-based Novell Inc. crowed this week that SUSE Linux Enterprise has surpassed all other Linux distros with 2,500 vendor-certified applications running on top of its operating system. If true, this would be quite astonishing since Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat Inc. has a far larger Linux market share.

Upon querying Novell’s PR agency, Andover, Mass.-based Pan Communications Inc. responded with a link to the Red Hat  Software Catalog which lists 2,166 certified software vendors, not applications, so Novell isn’t comparing apples to apples.

A Red Hat spokeswoman said, however, that there are 3,400 vendor applications certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

This is silliness. I feel like a mom telling two toddlers to go back to their sandboxes. (Red Hat is not really at fault here since it didn’t rush forth with a counterpunch.)  I’m probably more fascinated than the competition between these two companies and their strategies than anyone else I know. But this little self-promotion was a waste of time. And Novell, with its carefully worded misleading statements, has a lot to lose: its credibility. Let’s declare the “I’m bigger than you are” nonsense all over. Let’s all get back to work.

LAMP stack story overlooks impact of cloud, reader says

My recent story on the dimming of the LAMP stack sparked a thoughtful reader response from John Locke, the manager of Seattle-based Freelock Computing. The story concluded that while an all-open source stack is still a valid concept, there are many more open source options that LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl, Python, PHP) is largely irrelevant.  I made a single exception for Apache, the popular Web server.

Locke argued, however, that even Apache has a growing array of alternatives such as the Lighttpd Web server, the Apache FastCGI Web interface,  the Nginx proxy server and others.

But what undercuts the LAMP stack more than the advent of additional open source options is the emergence of cloud frameworks, Locke said.

Initially, cloud computing meant renting compute power on demand from the likes of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This meant renting a host virtual machine, programming the top layer, adding libraries and then when it was all done, managing the host and the virtual application, Locke said.

The problem with this model is that data centers are responsible for scaling the application up or down in response to changing volume requirements, he said. To solve this problem, Google, as well as Microsoft’s recently announced Azure platform, go beyond computing-on demand and manage the entire process with frameworks. All you do is write the application code (yes, you still need the P in LAMP), put it atop an application framework, and the framework will scale the application up and down as needed. No further involvement required. No LAMP stack required either.

Two successful examples of cloud frameworks are Salesforce.com and Facebook, he said.

The downside of frameworks, however, are loss of control and potential vendor lock-in, Locke said. The risk is less with Amazon EC2 since its controls are far more limited, he said. When writing an application for a specific vendor’s framework, however, a customer can lose portability because the provisioning and scaling mechanisms are behind-the-scenes and the source code and licensing are not necessarily readily available, he said.

The biggest challenge to LAMP as well as the Java and .NET stacks, therefore, is not the growth of additional choices but the cloud frameworks which may make all the stacks irrelevant. While handing over management and control is convenient, it also has its downside: you have to live by someone else’s rules, Locke said. Just  like a condo or regulated housing community, you’ve delegated the work, but you’ve also lost your freedom. Time will tell if you’ve made a good bet.

Red Hat scoops up accolades

Recently, Red Hat Inc. has scooped up some impressive awards. Last Saturday, Matthew Szulik, the chairman of the Raleigh, N.C.-based company was named the Ernst & Young entrepreneur of the year and the Ernst & Young national winner in technology for growing the open source company into a successful business.

 In presenting the award, James S. Turley, the chairman and CEO of Ernst & Young said that “Szulik follows a proud tradition of pioneering entrepreneurs who overcame skeptics and brought a novel, seemingly improbable business idea to market successfully.”

 Joining Red Hat as president and CEO in 1998, five years after the company was founded, Szulik headed day-to-day operations during almost a decade of expansion. He was replaced as president and CEO nearly a year ago by Jim Whitehurst and now serves as chairman.

 Three days later after Szulik received his award, Red Hat itself was named public company of the year by the North Carolina Technology Association. The award was given on the basis of sustained company growth, solid operating results and stock price appreciation.

 In these turbulent times, accolades are hard to come by.

Microsoft’s embrace of open source could signal turnaround

Microsoft used last week’s ApacheCon as a platform to reach out to the open source community in a public way.

In his keynote last Friday, Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s senior director of platform strategy, told the Apache faithful that Microsoft is serious about partnering with the open source community to create open standards and interoperability. Collaboration on the fundamentals will promote healthy growth, competition and a new round of innovation and will enable customers to allocate IT dollars for constructive uses instead of overcoming infrastructure bottlenecks.

The most recent example of Microsoft’s collaboration with its open source counterparts was its recent decision to join the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) Working Group for improving message interoperability at the application level, which is currently very difficult without expensive proprietary solutions. But Microsoft is also boosting interoperability with open source in Web services, security, databases and network monitoring, Ramji said. This past spring, Microsoft reached an interoperability “milestone” between Soap and Apache’s Axis Web services protocols, he added.

“I’m an eternal optimist. I’d have to be after three years of leading open source at Microsoft,” Ramji said. “There’s been a big shift in a short period of time,” involving hundreds of steps in a company with 93,000 employees, he said.

Ramji’s embrace of open source was echoed, if somewhat less strongly, in a speech last Friday in Australia by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and reported in a CNET blog by Matt Asay. In response to a question about its Internet Explorer browser, Ballmer said Microsoft is unlikely to make Explorer open source because of its proprietary extensions, but he didn’t reject the suggestion out of hand. The measured tone of Ballmer’s response, Asay wrote, “could well be the most rational, pragmatic, open-source-related comment from Ballmer that I’ve ever read.”

Ballmer’s comment suggests that Microsoft has finally recognized that open source can be a useful component of its overall software strategy, Asay concluded.

In other words, Microsoft may finally have decided to stop fighting open source and instead begin to find areas where the two communities can help each other. And that’s a good thing.

Collective Linux development model will be tough to beat, report says

The humble penguin is mascot of quite a treasure.

According to an updated Linux Foundation study, to build from scratch today, the Linux kernel would cost $1.4 billion; a typical Linux distro, $1.2 billion. In addition, Fedora 9, the current community version of Red Hat’s operating system, would cost a whopping $10.8 billion to replicate in current dollars.

The study also quoted a report from Framingham, Mass.-based IDC that appraised the collective value of the entire Linux computing ecosystem at $25 billion. That’s quite a trajectory for Linux Torvalds’ kernel in just 17 years.

The conclusion underlines the obvious: Linux has become a computing powerhouse, running everything from tiny mobile devices to the largest banks and supercomputers. While the software’s open code and modular construction are inherent advantages, the massive Linux community of individual and corporate developers who share the task and cost of improving the software are key to the platform’s success, the report concludes. In contrast, proprietary software companies, which must shoulder their development costs in isolation, will ultimately be hard put to compete with the open source model, the report concludes.

No kidding. As far as this blog is concerned, the report and its conclusions preach to the converted.

American Idol vs. Britney: Why open source will prevail, Red Hat says

Red Hat CEO and supersalesman Jim Whitehurst sure knows how to keep things simple. In yet another global tour pitching Red Hat, Whitehurst compared the open source development model to American Idol, the TV show that propelled country singer Carrie Underwood to instant fame, and the proprietary software model to Microsoft’s much-scorned Vista operating system and Britney Spears.

According to a ZDNet.co.uk article, Whitehurst told a Singapore business forum that companies using open source software address their major software pain points right away and can then share the results quickly with the rest of the community. Proprietary software companies, on the other hand, are slowed down by the need to solicit user feedback and then fix the problems through a top-down, planned development cycle. That model, proclaimed Whitehurst, is on the decline, he said.

Look at the recording industry, Whitehurst said. They spend far less to market American Idol winners, whose appeal has been proven up front than they do on the multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns for Britney Spears that lack a similar advance-popularity litmus test, Whitehurst said.

Whitehurst’s analogy couldn’t be clearer (which assumes that the typical Asian businessman is familiar with American Idol and is old enough to remember records). Anybody else still got any old 45s kicking around?