open source

Can Ubuntu Linux become a Windows killer?

There have been a number of articles written recently talking about Windows 7 being a Linux killer.

• Windows 7 as “Linux killer”? How times have changed!
• Windows 7: Microsoft’s Linux killer?
• Windows 7 The Linux killer and Ubuntu Going Mainstream

Linux was thought to be a player in the netbook business, but a Spring 2009 NPD Group study shows that Windows has a 90% share of the netbook OS market. It seems silly to be talking about any Windows desktop operating system as a Linux killer. There are so few Linux client operating systems deployed compared to Windows that this discussion is off target, especially because it appears that Windows 7 is an improvement over Windows Vista.

Today, about 25 or 26 paid Windows client operating systems are shipped for each paid Linux client shipped, according to IDC. Paid Windows client operating systems have more than 90% market share while Mac and Linux make up most of the remaining share. The market share lead that Windows has over Linux is not expected to change much for the foreseeable future.

There are about 30 times as many paid Windows client operating systems in use as there are paid Linux client operating systems deployed. And there are about 13 times as many non-paid Windows client operating systems in use as there are non-paid Linux clients.
Continued »

Servers in space: The future of data centers?

I have to say, I was immediately intrigued when I read the description of Server Sky. I had heard of floating water-based data centers, far north geothermal powered data centers, and an array of containerized and inventive data center options that all are focused on cheap energy, and greener concept. But until the October 22, 2009, meeting of the Eugene, Oregon IT Pro Forum, I had not thought of data centers in space (which, even while typing it, I think needs a series of exclamation points). But Keith Lofstrom has. Now, before the Star Wars fans start imagining a massive death-star-like space station filled with servers and astronauts/system admins, stop, you’re going to be disappointed.

I descended into the basement of the Eugene City Brewery (where else would IT geeks meet?), ordered my pint of Rogue Chocolate Stout and joined a smattering of local IT pros who had gathered to have a good brew and talk geek with their peers. It was in this darkened room, with large brew kettles visible through the glass windows behind the projector screen that I was introduced to Lofstrom’s vision of a data center in space.

Location is important in this story – the location of the data center, location of the presentation, and the location of the engineer. Lofstrom lives in Portland, Oregon, a city that has the slogan “It’s not easy being green,” within in a state that has put considerable effort behind attracting green industry. His silvery white hair is neatly pulled back into a low stub ponytail, perfect for fitting under his bicycle helmet as he commutes around the city. His attire is casual, with little frameless glasses that, along with the hair combined to evoke historic images of Benjamin Franklin. It’s clear he’s a thinker, a dreamer even, and he’s passionate about this idea.

Loftstrom explained that it all began when he heard a presentation about data center energy use, and the fact that as we all watch more videos, post more photos, and use the internet, the demand for energy from data centers will only increase. Much has been written about this problem and possible solutions so I won’t bore you with details. But to illustrate, Lofstrom shared the August 9, 2009, Dilbert comic:

Pretty gloomy, but the facts behind this image can be motivational to an engineer like Lofstrom.
He passed around a small device with a flash drive and a couple Ethernet ports that he uses as a firewall for his computer system. This device, he explained, inspired him to think about small physical computing devices that could be solar powered, and Server Sky was born. We all looked at the eight-and-a-half by eleven sheet of paper that he had prepared. On it was a diagram of the Server-sat.

Then Lofstrom explained that the diagram we saw was to scale.

Immediately, audience members had questions. Lofstrom explained that he would get to most of them through the course of the presentation. Incidentally, the presentation was given via a presentation software application he had developed that he hoped to get some more collaboration on because, he said, “If nothing else comes from this, I’d like to get this presentation software improved and kill PowerPoint.”

Lofstrom spent the next hour plus going over orbital physics, Moore’s Law, Newton, light pressure, satellite technology, space junk, and biology. He’s really been doing a lot of thinking on this, but admits he wants and needs more minds focused on it. With a background in open source software, Lofstrom is hoping to keep the project open to contribution from others for as long as possible, “before the investors come in and lock everything up.”

If you’re interested in finding out more information, you can view a recorded video of his presentation from Linux Fest Northwest 2009.

DIY government: Open source for America

Today, in conjunction with the O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) in San Jose, Calif., more than 70 companies, academic institutions, communities, related groups and individuals announced the formation of Open Source for America, an organization that will serve as a unified voice for the promotion of open source software in the U.S. Federal Government arena.

The mission of Open Source for America:

… is to educate decision makers in the U.S. Federal government about the advantages of using free and open source software; to encourage the Federal agencies to give equal priority to procuring free and open source software in all of their procurement decisions; and generally provide an effective voice to the U.S. Federal government on behalf of the open source software community, private industry, academia, and other non-profits.

Tim O’Reilly, Founder and CEO, O’Reilly Media presented the program during his keynote at OSCON on Wednesday morning, calling it an unprecedented opportunity for people to get involved with their government. He also tried to dispel the misunderstanding that exists that Gov 2.0 is all about social media. He explained that Gov 2.0 is also about transparency, rapid application development and procurement processes that allow approval of free software for agencies without getting mired in the usual DC bureaucracy.

O’Reilly pointed out that one of President Obama’s first steps in the White House was to issue an open government directive. Gartner has estimated that by 2011 more than 25% of government vertical, domain-specific applications will either be open source, contain open source application components or be developed as community source.

As O’Reilly spoke, he contrasted the old model of government, by the people, for the people to today’s version of government that seems to resemble a vending machine – taxes in, services out. Instead, he encouraged the open source community to view the government as a platform that can provide the tools and services so that we, the people, can do what needs to be done ourselves. He encouraged open source coders to get involved in the Open Source for America project - will you?

For more coverage of OSCON, view the crowdsourced news coverage page.

New OS game changer: Hannah Montana Linux

I try to use Twitter to stay on top of breaking Linux and IT news, but sometimes I run across a gem like this that isn’t necessarily newsworthy, but is quite humorous (or RFLMAO-worthy). Today, following on the heels of the big announcement about Google Chrome, we learned about Hannah Montana Linux (or HML).

Tounge-firmly-in-cheek, Liam Green-Hughes said, “Didn’t see this coming - but it is the top development in operating systems this year!”

While some were arguing about the timing and value of Google Chrome, few could argue about the value of HML. On Wednesday, some were complaining that Google made its announcement about Chrome without having a fully developed OS, or without having finished the Chrome browser for Linux and Mac OSX. But there were almost no complaints about HML today.

Regarding Google Chrome OS, Clay Shirky was wistful about the good old days when Google would finish a product before releasing it:
“Remember, Back In The Day, when Google used to build stuff, *then* announce it? I miss those days. *cough*Wave*cough*ChromeOS”

Shirky’s sentiment was popular enough to be “RT”ed (retweeted, or forwarded) multiple times on Wednesday by other Twitter users.

But not so with HML… Ok, well HML hasn’t been met in the Twittersphere with totally open arms. My recent Twitter Search found one “Eh,” two “WTF?”, a couple of “Eeeks”, some cries about kernel defilement, an apocalyptic warning, five “LMAO”’s and quite a few retweets of Geek Brief TV’s Cali Lewis’s post:
“I am like TOTALLY installing Hannah Montana Linux on my Eee PC today!”

The most curious part of the HML announcement is the Web page, which one Twitterer pointed out was made in iWeb. The page includes the basic information about the distribution, in a strangely barely coherent format. Take for example this explanation of what it is:

So your Probably Wondering what`s the difference between Hannah Montana Linux and Windows and Mac OS X well here are some of the differences .
one : Hannah Montana Linux can`t get viruses so you could say its virus proof
two : Hannah Montana Linux is Free as in you do not have to pay for it and that you can change anything you don`t like the code is all open so its called open source
three : don`t you hate looking around the internet to find software like on Windows and Mac OS X
not on Hannah Montana Linux well you can do it like that if you wanted to…

I can look past the non-parallel list, but the utter lack of proper punctuation and leaps in logic make me wonder if this site was created by a non-English speaker, or a real, live Hannah Montana fan…

The second question I have was echoed by Clefmeister, “Isn’t that a bit of brand over-saturation?” In fact, isn’t Hannah Montana a brand controlled by one of the most powerful companies in the United States (Disney)? While it’s an open source distribution, I’m thinking the Disney lawyers may swiftly act to have it taken down. My advice is, download it quick if you want it, because I don’t think it will last long.

Open source projects take advantage of Google Summer of Code opportunity

Open source companies and organizations including Novell and Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab are taking advantage of the fifth year of Google’s Summer of Code initiative.

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. Since 2005, the program has brought together nearly 2500 students and 2500 mentors and co-mentors from about 100 countries worldwide. The program works with open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund projects over a three month period. This year, 1,000 students have been selected to work on projects for over 130 open source organizations – see a full list of the GSoC sponsoring organizations for 2009. Through Google Summer of Code, accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from the participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits.

Zonker Brockmeier, Novell’s openSUSE Community Manager, is heading up the Novell participation in GSoC. Three of Novell’s sponsored open source initiatives are participating in the GSoC, hosting 24 student projects. The students with accepted projects will be mentored by Novell employees and community contributors with the openSUSE and Mono projects. The goal is to get students interested and potentially recruit future open source code contributors.

“I would say at least 25% or higher of past summer of code contributors have remained involved in projects,” shared Brockmeier. “We’ve seen fairly good return on the openSUSE project.”

Greg Lund-Chaix at Oregon State University’s open source laboratory has similar experiences with the GSoC program.

“We’re a bit different than most Summer of Code organizations in that we aren’t focused on one specific project,” Lund-Chaix explained. “We want to get more people involved with and support in open source in a broader sense. We certainly benefit internally from the work of our students, but the real benefit is the exposure of the students we mentor to the broader open source community.”

Participating organizations dedicate employee hours to help mentor the student developers. Neither Brockmeier or Lund-Chaix could quantify the hours spent, but both agreed the time was well-spent considering the outcome. For the students, the GSoC is supposed to be a full-time job, although it pays only a $1,000 stipend, making it attractive to only those dedicated students who can afford to give up a summer of potential earnings to gain coding experience.

After four years of experience, Google has improved the application process, improving the quality of submissions for the sponsor organizations.

“There were fewer proposals overall,” said Brockmeier. “But most organizations expressed they were seeing better quality this year.”

Lund-Chaix concurred, giving credit to the Melange tool team for streamlining the application review for sponsors.

“The quality of many of the proposals this year were definitely improved from previous years,” said Lund-Chaix. “There was no doubt whatsoever in our minds who we wanted to accept based on their applications. While we got the usual crop of frivolous or unacceptable applications, I was extremely pleased with the quality of many of the applications.”

I would love to hear from any past GSoC participants. If you have been a mentor or a student participant, share what you learned in the experience and how it has helped you in your career.

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?

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.”

Are you innovative? Tell Red Hat

Red Hat has opened submissions for the company’s third-annual Innovation awards. The winners will be announced at the 2009 Red Hat Summit in Chicago Sept. 1-4, 2009. Nominations will be accepted until May 31st.

The 2009 Innovation Awards will consist of six categories including:

• Management Excellence: Recognition of the impressive use of management tools, including Red Hat Network and JBoss Operations Network, to drive down TCO and increase ROI.
• Optimized Solutions: Recognition of striking performance, scalability and/or usability enhancements delivered with open source solutions.
• Superior Alternatives: Recognition of the most successful migration from proprietary solutions to open source alternatives.
• Extensive Ecosystem: Recognition of the use of Red Hat or JBoss’ expanding partner ecosystem to create innovative architectures based on open source solutions.
• Carved out Costs: Recognition of customers who have leveraged open source solutions to significantly cut costs and extract added value from existing systems.
• Outstanding Open Source Architecture: Recognition of the use of Red Hat, JBoss, and partner offerings to create innovative architectures based on open source solutions. (Both Red Hat Summit and JBoss World registrants may compete for this award)

Nominations for each Innovation Award category will be judged by a panel of representatives and industry leaders including: Lee Congdon, CIO of Red Hat; Craig Muzilla, vice president, Middleware Business for Red Hat; John R. Rymer from Forrester Research, Inc.; Dana Gardner, a principal analyst from Interarbor; Jay Lyman from The 451 Group; Steven Vaughan-Nichols, editor-in-chief of Practical Technology.

Software company unifies rival OSes, benefits war victims

This blog post was written by Bridget Botelho, a news writer.

When I get pitches from companies that are rife with marketing bull, I am quick to hit delete. But when Likewise Software sent me this goofy press release to promote its products, I couldn’t bring myself to send it to the recycle bin.

Likewise Software is promoting peace between rival operating systems Linux, Unix, Windows and Mac by raising money for real-world victims of war with T-shirt sales.

The connection is that the Bellevue, Wash.-based company’s software enables users to integrate rival operating systems into one unified Windows environments. Its open source offering, Likewise Open, lets mixed data centers integrate Linux, Unix and Mac systems with a unified directory such as Microsoft Active Directory. Likewise Enterprise Edition does that as well but also includes features for migration, group policy, auditing and reporting modules.

“To commemorate the ending of the OS hostilities, Likewise has released two t-shirts, which people can proudly wear to demonstrate their commitment to the hope, and to the peaceful co-existence of heterogeneous systems (that, um, means Windows, Mac OS, Linux and Unix.).”

Silly, I know, but all proceeds from sales of the $20 T-shirts are being donated to organizations that help both civilian and military casualties of real war.

Is Microsoft suit against TomTom first shot in Linux war?

Is Microsoft’s suit filed against GPS device maker TomTom the first shot in a larger Linux war? That was the question being asked yesterday after news spread that Microsoft had filed a patent-infringement suit in US District Court for the Western District of Washington against TomTom NV and Tom Tom Inc. The Linux community went into a tizzy in 2007 over Microsoft’s patent tirade, which indicated that open source software violated 235 of the company’s patents. At the time, experts explained that this move by Microsoft could just be some arm twisting to create more Novell-like deals. Yesterday’s announcement reignited some of that concern, but left some scratching their heads after what appeared to be a series of recent moves by Microsoft to work with the open-source community. These include last week’s announcement of a Microsoft interoperability agreement with Red Hat, sans patent pledges.

So what gives? According to Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s corporate vice president deputy general counsel for intellectual property, this case is not about open-source, specifically. In an interview with Todd Bishop at TechFlash, he explained:

… open-source software is not the focal point of this action. The case against TomTom involves infringement of Microsoft patents by TomTom devices that employ both proprietary and open-source, and as I said, out of the eight patents, five of them relate to proprietary software infringement.

Some cool-headed folks within the Linux community also spoke out yesterday, urging others to “calm down.” One of these was the executive director of the Linux Foundation, Jim Zemlin, who posted a blog post that began with just that phrase. Other open-source leaders were leery, as was indicated in a CNET news piece on the suit.

It’s too early to tell, but from what I have seen, all the Linux community can do is watch and learn, and as Zemlin says, “hope for the best, and prepare for the worst.”