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.

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.

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?

Speaking before an 80-member audience, two Novell engineers presented SUSE as a comprehensive Linux platform with the tools and applications to run a seamlessly managed, automated data center and address OS, management applications and virtualization. They also hinted at future improvements in virtualization, security and file systems.

Geared more to prospects than customers, the lively discussion encouraged audience participation, rewarding questioners with Linux penguins that featured the Novell logo, of course. The presentation included an impressive demo of live migration, moving a new James Bond movie from server to desktop without interruption.

Hewlett-Packard Co., which sponsored the event, made its hardware pitch during lunch.

The event was a great way to get Novell’s message out there. And the view of Boston from the top of the Hyatt was fantastic.

Yet the foundation’s first End User Collaboration Summit in New York City this week was closed to the press and the public, open only to guests by invitation.

Does anyone see a contradiction here?

While the purpose of the Linux Foundation is to promote the use of open source software, the foundation will hold a closed conference with several hundred attendees to discuss how to accelerate innovation in the platform.

In declining my request to attend the summit, the foundation wrote that “the end users there are completely paranoid about getting quoted in the press and made us close it.” The end users. That means the big IT guns in the audience. No doubt they came from many industries but had a heavy representation from Wall Street firms who like having access to open source code and modifying it for their own competitive advantage without allowing their rivals (who might be in the next seat) in on the secret. It’s a tight-lipped group.

Exactly how would the presence of the press infringe on the confidentiality of the conference attendees? Would it make them reticent to ask questions? Even with the press absent, their competitors were still there to pick up any nuance in a question. If the insistence on secrecy comes from the “end users,” the confidentiality problem would have been better solved by simply having attendees ask speakers questions privately, as I did to the CIO of Merrill Lynch following his keynote at LinuxWorld. (To his very evident annoyance, I might add.)

If the push for a closed meeting came from speakers, that’s bad, too. One summit speaker defended the closed meeting by saying his company requires advance permission to give presentations at a public event, and it makes such permission difficult to obtain. (That sounds like the recent Chinese Olympics, which created special locations for protests  but didn’t grant speaking permits.) How sad this is if corporations in the land of the free and the brave prevent their brightest developers from leading workshops and helping others because they might divulge corporate secrets. (And based on the workshops I’ve attended, that’s highly unlikely.)

Just this week, I struggled to find a user who would speak to me about his experience with a Fedora community project and a Red Hat spokeswoman explained that the Fedora project participants couldn’t speak to me either without getting prior corporate permission. (All this fuss over a new installer.)

Under the same principle of “protectionism,” what if the U.S. decided to close its borders to imports to boost local manufacturers and businesses? What if federal, state and local governments decided to close public meetings and decisions to avoid holding officials accountable for difficult (or slimy) actions?

I think the Linux Foundation caved on this issue. By closing the door on the press, it also closed the door to everyone except an elite handful. The thousands of Linux users who might have benefited directly or indirectly from the idea exchange and thought up new ideas on their own will never get that cross-fertilization opportunity.

Conferences on open source software should be open to the press and the public — period.

A SearchEnterpriseLinux reader from Queensland, Australia, wrote that my recent article asking whether open source is really cheaper than proprietary software missed the point.

“Most users are locked into the concept of Microsoft and this is the problem,” wrote Trevor Hughes. “For Mr. Average, Linux has much to recommend it. If I can do it anyone can. I am 57 and a newcomer to computing. For Internet communications and normal use, Windows is NOT worth the money.”

Hughes really takes issue with the article’s conclusion that users require more technical expertise and a certain openness to risk-taking to maximize the financial savings of open source. However, the article actually addresses Linux on servers in the data center, not Linux on home desktops.

Nevertheless, Hughes expresses the positive, can-do, problem-solving attitude that would lead to successful operation of Linux in the data center — and Windows, too, for that matter.

It’s pretty obvious that Linux can be a big money-saver over Windows. Why else would so many big corporations make the switch? It’s like anything else. There are always trade-offs, and companies and individuals are able to vote with their dollars on what they want to do. And choice is always a good thing.

In the meantime, however, U.K.-based TechRadar.com recently published Linux: The Girlfriend Test, and a tough test it was indeed. The goal: to find out if a first-time Linux user, presumably a female college student, could accomplish nine familiar Windows tasks using Fedora 9, the community version of Red Hat.

Here are the tasks and how she fared on each one:
1. Bookmark a website in Firefox. No problem.
2. Write and print a letter in OpenOffice. The first part was easy but the letter wouldn’t print and no error message appeared with a reason or resolution.
3. Rip a CD. Task accomplished. But Fedora failed to identify all the output options.
4. Send an instant message. After several unsuccessful attempts, she succeeded by going to msn.com and inputting user data from her Windows Live Messenger account.
5. Create a pie chart in OpenOffice. No problem.
6. Transfer the ripped CD to her iPod. Attempt failed because of a protocol problem. Again, no error message appeared to identify or fix the difficulty.
7. Move a photo of her head onto a photo of her boyfriend’s body using Photoshop. Easy.
8. Watch a video on YouTube. Failed because Firefox was unable to install Flash player due to a malformed file. There was no work-around explanation.
9. Make an international phone call using Skype. Application installation was successful but audio playback problems prevented communication.

The writer concluded that Linux needs to do more with wizards and pop-up instructions to help new users without a technical background successfully transition from Windows or Macintosh to the Linux desktop.

I agree. But I have to say it was a pretty tough test, and the writer never mentioned how he fared in the “Boyfriend Shopping Test” that was his part of the bargain. Inquiring readers want to know.

One day after publication, the Novell ZenWorks problem that I blogged about Sept. 17 appears to be on its way to resolution. Not that resolution was speedy; the issue was the topic of numerous emails between the customer, Novell and TechTarget for three weeks.

Grant Nickle, IT director for Louisville, Ky.-based Underwriters Safety & Claims, told me in mid-August that ZenWorks 10, a configuration management application, had many improvements over its predecessor but contained a key flaw: It wouldn’t retain user identities and settings in the cache after a user signed off or was no longer on the network. The omission is critical for an IT department that manages hundreds of desktops because there is no other way to preserve user identities except through Microsoft Active Directory. Making matters worse, Nickle never got a promised call from tech support.

Yesterday afternoon, however, Nickle spoke directly with the product manager, who assured Nickle that the full functionality of the Dynamic Local User, which used to remember each user’s desktop settings and files, would be restored prior to Novell’s next Brainshare user conference in March. And Nickle has the product manager’s name and phone number to make sure he keeps his promise. In the meantime, Nickle will have to rely on ZenWorks 7, which doesn’t work with Microsoft Vista, but at least he knows he’s got a finite time to wait for a fix.

Actually, Nickle did Novell a favor by bringing a problem, which others in the user forum have complained about as well, to its attention. Kudos to Novell for recognizing and addressing the issue. Nevertheless, a nagging suspicion remains that it’s not as easy for an average user to bring a real problem to a software company’s attention as it should be. And that’s something all software companies should be striving aggressively to remedy. Just like nurses and physicians who need to be alert to minor symptoms of potentially major illnesses, there ought to be a way for software companies to flag a complaint that points to a serious problem and direct it out of normal channels to someone who can assess and remedy the issue. In the meantime, though, I’m celebrating Nickle’s victory. Novell listened and acted. And that’s a victory for us all.

Red Hat Inc. is forging open source inroads in education these days.

For starters, the Raleigh, N.C.-based company teamed up with Intel Corp. to help equip the new New York City Open Source Solutions Lab on the City University of New York (CUNY) campus. With software donated by Red Hat and hardware by Intel, the new center will help the city and public agencies develop and test open source applications for municipal and state use.

In addition to government use, however, the lab also will be used to train students in working with open source software.

Ted Brown, executive director of the CUNY Institute for Software Design and Development, said that students need to learn how to work with open source software because open source is a large and growing trend.

Closer to Red Hat’s home base, Red Hat engineer Will Cohen is teaching a graduate course in free and open source (FOSS) software at North Carolina State University. Introduced last spring, the FOSS course enables students to join in ongoing projects of their choice and learn skills such as fixing bugs, testing software and adding new features as well as strengthening their project management and collaboration skills.

Promoting these higher education efforts is the Fedora Project Team, which conducted a three-week tour last spring, visiting 15 of the nation’s top universities to encourage use and instruction in open source software.

Jack Aboutboul, one of the tour participants, told Red Hat News that the faculty and students were very responsive to Fedora’s message about open source software.

“When you have the chance to fundamentally re-architect modern computer science education in the U.S. you take it,” he said. “The time is right to begin incorporating open source into both the campus environment and the curriculum.”