I’m not quite sure how I missed seeing the news until today, but I just noticed that Red Hat made a “strategic investment” in EnterpriseDB – the company behind PostgreSQL. I think this is a very interesting move.
Many seem to have their concerns or at least questions about Sun+MySQL, but with Oracle in the mix those issues appear to have snowballed into an avalanche. Even the EU has shown its concern. I think a key issue for the Linux community is whether Oracle will create enough impetus to move people away from MySQL’s technology platform or not enough impetus which will make MySQL clones attractive. It’s harder to move wholesale to a new database technology than it would be to move to a different open source clone. But then customers (paying ones) get into the issues of support, fidelity, and roadmaps. The all too repetitive issue of forking will inevitably take center stage.
Two thoughts: 1) what does this mean for a community Linux FOSS database solution and 2) why Postgre SQL?
As for question 1), at the end of the day, I think a strategic question has to be answered. That is whether a FOSS database is important enough to have maintained by an independent community organization/foundation similar to Apache, Eclipse, Mozilla, etc. Not like CodePlex which is a front for 1 company, but a foundation where multiple companies, invested community members and influencers provide some level of guidance/control. MySQL’s code could become that base, or it could be Postgre SQL. However, the current situation is no foundation-led free and open source database platform – which appears at odds with what the community seems to expect out of the “MySQL poster child” for a FOSS database. MySQL is a company and should be treated as such (although it remains to be seen how Oracle treats it…).
As for question 2), I think the savvy move by Red Hat is around Postgres Plus – the “Oracle compatibility” that EnterpriseDB commercially licenses for a fee. (what does Oracle compatibility mean is answered here) Postgres Plus also allows a customer to migrate Oracle-based applications to use a Postgres database engine that “looks like” an Oracle database. Now consider customers constantly complain about Oracle’s license fee increases and consider that at least 20% of any customers Oracle environment is “low priority” Oracle applications that they could pilot moving to another platform and now EnterpriseDB is starting to sound attractive.
I don’t have a crystal or Magic 8 ball to say where this will lead, but I’m sure we’ll all have fun watching ;-) One thing is for sure – MySQL is under pressure from all sides and there’s a viable alternative to Oracle’s core database platform. Now Oracle just needs to figure out if it can fix the mess it’s in with the EU ;-)
Between September and August, Internet Explorer dropped a significant 1.26 percentage points (from 66.97 percent to 65.71 percent) and Firefox moved up a sizeable 0.77 percentage points (from 22.98 percent to 23.75 percent). Safari increased 0.17 percentage points (from 4.07 percent to 4.24 percent) while Chrome once again moved further away from Opera: it gained a worthy 0.33 percentage points (from 2.84 percent to 3.17 percent).
Interesting news out of the FTC. They’re going to start regulating blogs as they would an advertisement – though it doesn’t seem 1:1 in terms of advertising claims regulations and blogs. I do think this is a good move (perhaps overdue). Some bloggers like those at Redmonk have been disclosing their possible (even remote) conflicts of interest with clients for a long time (as financial analysts would be required). IBM bloggers all have disclaimers on their websites. It looks like blogs are “growing up”.
How long will it take for WordPress users to create a “sponsored by” plugin ;-)
The FTC will require that writers on the Web clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products. The commission also said advertisers featuring testimonials that claim dramatic results cannot hide behind disclaimers that the results aren’t typical.
The FTC said its commissioners voted 4-0 to approve the final guidelines, which had been expected. The guides are not binding law, but rather interpretations of law that hope to help advertisers comply with regulations. Violating the rules, which take effect Dec. 1, could result in various sanctions including a lawsuit.
A few colleagues have pointed out a Symantec blog post about Michael Dolan going to jail for 7 years. This is a different Michael Dolan (not me) and it has to do with spamming AOL.
While I haven’t been posting as much, it’s not because of any trial! I just wanted to let everyone know I am not planning on being away for the next 7 years…
Just received an email notice from the Ohio LinuxFest team today.
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It’s only a little more than a month from now, the seventh Ohio LinuxFest. This year we will be celebrating 40 years of Unix!
If you haven’t heard, we are very excited and proud to have Doug McIlroy give a key note address this year. Doug was the head of research department at Bell Laboratories where Unix was invented and is credited for the inventing Unix pipes as well as writing many of the Unix tools we still use in some form today.
Shawn Powers of the Linux Journal will give an address on the current state of Linux, 40 years after the invention of Unix.
Dr. Peter Salus, Bdale Garbee, and Elizabeth Garbee will be returning this year, and more speakers will be announce shortly.
Again, as last year, a set of training classes will be held on Friday before the main conference. These classes are available with the Professional Package registration, and if you are interested, you may upgrade your registration online at ohiolinux.org. Space is limited, so please register early.
Classes include:
* LPI Certification Level One Cram
* Black Magic: Troubleshooting and System Administration
* Disaster Recovery – Will You Survive?
* Spam Filtering With Open-Source Tools
* Linux Terminal Server Project Administration
* Advanced Security – A Self-Assessment Study
* Introduction to LDAP: Provisioning, Managing, and Integrating
A Diversity in Open Source workshop will be held on Sunday September 27. Please join the conversation on how to improve the way we work together and attract much needed talent to the open source development model.
We are quite pleased to announce Novell is a Platinum Level sponsor Digium as a Gold Level sponsor of Ohio LinuxFest 2009. Other sponsors include Hurricane Labs, Zenoss, Scalable Informatics, Linux Fund, Red Hat, and Peak 10. There is still time left to be a contributing organization. Please send sponsorship inquires to sponsor@ohiolinux.org.
As we are a 501c3 non-profit organization, we depend on sponsorships and attendee registration fees to hold the Ohio LinuxFest. Given the current economic downturn, we are proud to move forward, but if you haven’t done so, please consider purchasing the Supporter Package. With the valuable support from you, we can continue the tradition of Ohio LinuxFest.
Finally, we would like to make an appeal to you to help us get the word out. Time is short! Please tell your friends, coworkers, fellow students, and fellow LUG members about the Ohio LinuxFest. Send emails, post blog entries, and invite people. We have banners and audio at ohiolinux.org and please feel free to use and distribute.
Thank you and see you in Columbus, Mike
PS.
I want to send out a thank you to the people that made Ohio LinuxFest 2009 a reality:
Beth Lynn Eicher, Greg Boehnlein, Dennis “Bear” Palmer, Robert Ball, Moose, Klaatu, Dan Chen, Carol Rutz, Makenzie Morgan, Scott “Skippy” Merrill, Paul Ferris, Kevin Otte, Nicholas Schembri, Sabrina Downard, Jon “maddog” Hall.
The topic of state sales taxes has been a sleeper issue over the last few years. Congress keeps passing moratoriums on out of state Internet sales, but states are trying to come up with clever ways of taxing the business. Amazon seems to be the target of many state legislators and understandably so.
I recently bought a Canon T1i for $950. I bought it online at Amazon.com with free shipping (took 3 days to arrive). The local camera shop had plenty of them in stock and I could have picked it up that day. However, at 8% local sales tax, that camera would have cost an extra $76 for no incremental benefit to me as I wasn’t in any rush to get it so the 3 day delay was fine. The camera shop also closes at 5pm promptly during the week which is an annoyance and nearly impossible for me to get to anyway.
Why would anyone buy from a local store? I bought a plasma HDTV for a few thousand dollars a couple years ago. I saved approximately $175 that would have gone to sales tax by again buying it online (at Amazon.com). I buy EVERYTHING online these days. I’m probably one of a few power users of the iPhone Amazon.com app.
State sales tax policies will kill local retailers, local businesses, and local jobs. It’s odd, but your states implicitly encourage you to buy things from other states rather than the shop down the street. The Internet, USPS, UPS and Fedex have made it infinitely easier today than say 10-15 years ago.
The state sales tax is antiquated and adversely impacting local businesses. State governments need to stop trying to chase down Amazon.com and the 1,000 other Internet retailers who will pop up next.
How should states fix this? Who knows – taxes and markets are a complicated and dynamic system. I haven’t researched which states may have found alternative approaches, but I personally think the state sales tax has to go away. Sure, “local items” like gas, alcohol, etc are easy targets to continue a sales tax, but that’s because they can’t be shipped across state lines by individuals. I can see some moron legislator coming up with a plan to ban importing HDTVs next…
The reality is states needs to create a new, modern tax policies that align local interests and provide the funding needed for the services residents expect. It won’t be easy, but it can be done.
Many cities still tax personal income – another nonsensical issue. They should tax people based on the property the occupy. There’s no reason I should have to contribute to a local city 3x more than the guy down the street does just because I work harder, invested for more higher education, and accepted a more work-intensive lifestyle. I get the same municipal benefit he does but I should pay 3x more? When my wife and I moved from Tarrytown NY last year (no municipal income tax), we moved into another municipality that has no income tax as well. Sure, we pay for these things in property taxes, but it’s a more “even” allocation of the tax burden.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an “anti-tax” person. I’ll pay my fair share and that’s fine. I think that many of these taxation systems are trying to patch a failing system that no longer makes sense in our modern economy where physical boundaries are no longer relevant.
That’s what you get when you add an “app store” to HP Printers. As I mentioned a short time ago I think it’s time to develop an open framework for app stores and delivery of applications. There are so many “one off” instances, it becomes a very inefficient support process for ISVs and developers. These “non-Apple” (read non-market-leaders) followers have an opportune moment to collaborate together in an open forum and put forth a truly competitive platform.
In addition to receiving apps preloaded on the printer, people can download new ones as they become available at the HP Apps Studio to suit their interests and needs. With the sweep of a finger, users will be able to browse and view popular web destinations and simply touch the app of their choice to launch a web page where they can customize and print content on demand in an easy-to-read format.(1)
I think this is great news for potential patent reform (long overdue). David certainly has experience with open source licensing and IP issues related to open development.
While many will see the press generalizations about David’s views on IP reform, why not listen to his interview with Scoble from August of 2007 and hear for yourself? In the interview David talks about collaborative innovation, open standards and open source which I think many will still find very interesting.
The Obama administration’s choice to head the US Patent and Trademark Office, IBM’s David Kappos, appears to be getting rave reviews, which can only partly be attributed to the fact that Kappos has been a prominent advocate of patent reform.
Some very intriguing news over at Ars about California’s move to digital textbooks. I’m not sure they’re on a sustainable model yet and California will have to work out all the kinks. This comment in particular made me conclude this:
“We’re pretty excited about what we’re seeing,” he said. “We actually have one commercial publisher who is submitting several of their textbooks [as open sourced material] for review, so this will be pretty groundbreaking, and I think it will be a paradigm shift for the publishers as well. They’re taking a paid resource they used to charge the districts for, and basically allowing the districts to download it for free.”
In my opinion, California should consider establishing a governance body of key education materials stakeholders and find a way to both incentivize content submissions, ensure “polish”, and ensure there’s a strong pipeline of contributors. They’ll need a “community manager”.
I think the great news is that this approach appears to have been in the works for many years, it intuitively makes sense, and I’m sure there are many willing to contribute. Just think – perhaps PhD students should be required to contribute as part of their graduate coursework?? There’s many ways to make this work, but I really hope they don’t expect people will just come out of the woodwork with open source, “polished”, “free” textbooks that integrate and that anyone can use for all purposes.
The first link is to Arnold’s written statement, the second is to Ars’ interview where I pulled the quote above.
I can’t help but think with Apple, Sun, Nokia and others with “AppStores” live and working or clones in the works, is it time to have 1 set of open, “AppStore” APIs? I certainly wouldn’t expect it from Apple as they’re currently the market leader, but all these “me too” players should consider consolidating resources for 1 API set that could be shared and collaboratively built upon. There’s no reason this couldn’t be possible and successful. We need strong competition in this space – not just weak, feable, short term “tries” at building a competing store to Apple…
There’s a certain point in any technology’s adoption that you step back and think to yourself “there’s no going back now”. It’s then that you realize the technology has “crossed the chasm” and whether some would wish it away or whether early adopters start testing a new “next generation” that technology will still be here to stay. I **think** ODF is there now. When you look at the government adoption levels it makes a very compelling case for “here to stay”. The fact is that as governments develop a standard, all government agencies, citizens who use the documents, and vendors who work with the government will all start to adopt the format.
I know within IBM we’re making the switch. Bob Sutor recently pointed that out. On Friday I also upgraded to the latest build of Symphony (as did every IBMer did per our automatic update tool). The switch still has miles to go, but much of the mythical “last mile cable” has been installed.
What prompted me to realize this just today? I receive the ODF Alliance Newsletter regularly in my inbox. Today, I noticed the following:
(note that while the URL is in Spanish, the translation can be seen here thanks to Google)
ECUADOR CHARTS PATH TO ODF ADOPTION
The latest government in South America to advance the use of ODF is Ecuador. Upon its approval by the Instituto Ecuatoriano de Normalización (INEN) as an Ecuadoran national standard, ODF was also adopted for sending and receiving documents by the national government’s Secretariat for Information Technology (Subsecretaría de Informática), whose mission is to improve the government’s management of IT projects and coordinate actions in this field in other public sector institutions in Ecuador . In South America, the governments of Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela have already adopted ODF, as have several regional governments, including Parana (Brazil) and Misiones (Argentina).
It amazes me the extent “ambulance chasing” attorneys will go. Personally, I would love to see a defendant use the attorneys own ads in trial somehow… Perhaps the local bar associations should do peer reviews or something to weed out the bad apples.
Yesterday on my way to the Cavs game, I saw a truck that was essentially a big billboard for an attorney advertising just like “Pyle Law”…
Why are Netbooks such a threat to Microsoft? It’s not just the abundance of Linux shipping on them. It’s their profitability flying off the shelves (or via UPS these days…)
Consider: 1 Dell Mini 9 Netbook with Vista Home Basic for just $299
Consider: 1 Dell Mini 9 Netbook with Ubuntu for just $249
So, for $199 you can get a software license for Microsoft. For just $100 more, you can get a working netbook with that software license. Or, for just $50 more, you can get that same Netbook with Linux.
If you had just $300 to spend, who wants to pick the software license?
Now, consider what this is doing to Microsoft’s margins… Your premium pricing power has just been put under pressure – not by Linux, but by the hardware underneath the OS that just dropped from days of $1,000 laptops to $299. Microsoft can’t justify doubling the price of the product just for its software license. And Ubuntu is clearly offering hardware vendors a key counterpoint in their negotiations with Microsoft.
Microsoft is also in a bind as enforcing its premium pricing will either
invite priracy b/c who can look at the offerings and justify paying that much retail for the OS, and which hurts their margins more (a paying customer is better than a pirating one…)
2) alienate a new set of younger, price conscious buyers entering the market (not just in the US, but around the world)
Clearly Microsoft is in need of a strategy refresh – and fast. I see the tide turning where their downstream users and upstream suppliers will create a challenging negotiation. Michael Porter would have fun with this analysis.
And with that… I may just order myself a Netbook soon. They’re almost as cheap as iPods now…
I don’t buy the argument that the economy caused Circuit City’s failure. Take one look at its competitors, and you know that the market for consumer electronics and computer equipment remains strong, even in this economy. You can walk into any Apple Store and see large crowds of people lining up to buy computers and iPods. But enough has been said about how wonderful Apple is. I want to tell you about another first-class consumer electronics retailer — a much smaller business you probably haven’t been to, unless you live in New York City or are a professional photographer or an avid hobbyist. It’s called B&H.
It may also be accessing Web data stores like Wikipedia (which runs on Linux – Ubuntu I hear) over a router (possibly running Linux), protected by a firewall (likely running Linux). Starting to see a theme?
I’ve given several talks in the last two months about the relationship of Linux to the Smarter Planet initiatives. The key elements to that are the three “I”s: being instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent. This Jeopardy! project is definitely related to the last. To borrow from a slide I use: “How can we take advantage of the wealth of information available in real time from a multitude of sources to make more intelligent choices?”
I won’t belabor the point but you get the idea. More and more Linux is being used as the foundation on which innovative applications are being built. We don’t always know it, we can’t always measure it, but it’s there. And someday it just might help beat you at Jeopardy!.
I just read Stephen O’Grady’s classic Q&A on Sun-Oracle. Another through analysis. There are certainly many angles to this one… and many questions that will play out over time.
TomTom has belatedly joined a patent holding company, which champions the Linux ecosystem, in a clear message that the GPS maker won’t take its escalating legal with Microsoft lying down.
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The group, which has some big backers in the open source community, including IBM, Novell and Red Hat, was founded with the sole aim of acquiring patents relating to Linux and offering them royalty-free to Linux developers.
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“I’d say the Microsoft/TomTom battle just got bigger, and TomTom is in a stronger position than it was”, wrote Groklaw today in response to the OIN announcement.
I just saw Al Gillen covered the news from Red Hat and Microsoft on virtualization. Note the differences between this announcement and the Novell-Microsoft announcement. Two approaches that both achieve the same general customer result – which approach is better is up to you to decide/discuss ;-)
What’s also interesting is that so far, Red Hat has only submitted for Windows certification on KVM and not yest on RHEL/Xen (which is currently shipping).
With the continuing growth and scale of Linux, you would think it was still early in its lifecycle, but today’s blog post by Alex Pinchev at Red Hat reminded me it’s been 10 years since IBM and Red Hat first partnered. 10 years – so much has changed in that time. I was only around for less than half that time working on the IBM side, but it was always an exciting and dynamic area to work in. I think we’ll see many more years of success ahead.
Today we are celebrating a momentous occasion. Ten years ago today, Red Hat and IBM began our global collaborative partnership to expand the use of enterprise solutions on Linux. It was a small but important start to announce that IBM would run Red Hat Linux on its industry-standard systems. Back in 1999, Red Hat was on the eve of its IPO, and IBM was testing the waters of Linux. Only 10 million users ran the Linux operating system at the time, according to IDC Research quoted in our original partnership announcement.
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