One thing is for sure – this is going to be a roller coaster ride for Novell execs and employees. Novell actually has a lot of cash relative to its revenues so it was only a matter of time before someone would go raiding. Elliott is in it for a flip profit … and the financials are lined up perfectly. (or someone behind Elliot who is in it for other reasons ;-) This is a savvy move, but also as Andy says a potentially dangerous game – if they win and overpaid.

If you’re reading any analysis of the situation, make sure you read Andy’s take in the link below. At the end of the day, the GPL, Suse, the technology, etc won’t matter – this is going to be a nasty game billion dollar chicken game for profits.

http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20100304051547830

I haven’t seen any article yet, though,  that describes in detail how the high stakes game of tender offers is played, and how the usual process maps (and doesn’t) to a high tech company like Novell.  So I thought I’d provide an overview for those that haven’t had occasion to follow a tender offer in the past, and also my thoughts on what may happen over the next several months in this particular game of cat and mouse.

http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-management/red-hat-invests-in-enterprisedb-eye-oracle-and-mysql-855

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).

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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

See http://www.ohiolinux.org/olfu.html for information and details.

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.

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.

Scoble Interview: http://www.mefeedia.com/entry/3286371/

Ars covered the news here:

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.

And this is a link to the official announcement.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/President-Obama-Announces-More-Key-Administration-Posts-6-18-09/

• Consider: 1 license for Vista Home Basic $199 at Best Buy
• 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

1. 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. 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…

http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2009/04/21/settingsun/

lease note this is still a fast changing filesystem technology and should not be used on anything near production workloads.

I can’t wait to see 2.6.30 release and this is one technology I will try out right away. For more information on Btrfs, you can check out this page.

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).

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=lcUS21686409

The Red Hat and Microsoft agreement simply is about cross-validation/certification and does not have any IP or financial implications.

 

Now that it’s been announced internally, I can briefly spill the beans that I have a new and expanded role in IBM. My standards and open source IP/membership/policy team and I are moving to the Software Group, and I am picking up…

Looking at the article /. linked to, this may be a while off  with Bartlett saying, “we don’t know what people need”

From /.

“Enterprise networks now have an alternative choice to Microsoft Active Directory (AD) servers, with the open source Samba project aiming for feature parity with the forthcoming release of version 4, according to Canberra-based Samba developer Andrew Bartlett. Speaking at this year’s linux.conf.au Linux and open source conference in Hobart, Bartlett said Samba 4 is aiming to be a replacement for AD by providing a free software implementation of Microsoft’s custom protocols. Because AD is ‘far more than LDAP and Kerberos,’ Bartlett said, Samba 4 is not only about developing with Microsoft’s customization of those protocols, it is also about moving the project beyond just providing an NT 4 compatible domain manager.”

Oh, I forgot to mention that the IBM solution runs on Ubuntu and can be easily deployed on RHEL/SLED too ;-)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/04/ibm_linux_lotus_virtual_desktop/

IBM is working with Virtual Bridges and its VERDE (Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment) product to ship a virtual Canonical Ubuntu Linux desktop, with Lotus email, word processing, spreadsheets, unified communication, and social networking software included, to a variety of end-point devices. Virtual printing is also included.

…

When we look back several years from now, I think we’ll see this time as an inflection point when the economic climate pushed the virtual Linux desktop from theory to practice. The financial pressures on organizations are staggering; the management of PCs is unwieldy, and traditional office software innovation is paltry. Today’s virtual desktop is delivering superior collaborative software, an innovative delivery method, and an open-source operating system that is demanding clients’ consideration.

Within the first two weeks, both had their laptops infected by viruses separately – different viruses, different times. One was running XP, the other Vista on you basic Dell laptops. Of course, who did they call? Answer: me.

Well, I took in both laptops and tried to fix them. I found that viruses today are far more advanced – one modified the MBR and the other completely wiped out the Dell recovery partition – savvy indeed. I did my best to try re-installing their respective Windows OSs, but I found that Microsoft’s licensing practices prevented me from succeeding. First, I only had Pro CDs of XP and Vista so the Home license keys on the underside of each laptop were of no use. I’d install the OS, then Microsoft Genuine Advantage would block me… thanks Microsoft.

So I had them try calling Dell – of course, no luck. They wouldn’t send a replacement media for Windows. If I had the time and energy, I’d file a lawsuit against them tomorrow.

So I turned to my laptop OS of choice: Ubuntu. No chance for a license key or media obtainment problem.

My sisters had both seen me using Ubuntu before so they had seen “what it looked like” but they never knew it wasn’t Windows. When I loaded it on their laptops, they actually didn’t know it wasn’t Windows. In fact, the first thing they both did was try downloading/installing iTunes from Apple.com. No luck – Apple, where’s an Ubuntu client?

So I set them up with all the software they needed for iPods. They actually installed their own printers without even calling me (HP printers – great compatibility). They use OpenOffice for their papers/spreadsheets/presentations, Firefox was not new to them, and Evolution is just as easy as Outlook.

They’re now both about to close out their first semester – both made it on Ubuntu alone. And the best news – not a single virus.

More amazingly, the overall number of “support requests” have gone down. Even when they had Windows there were other reasons for calls, but now… only an occassional “how do I?” type question here or there. It’s been great. They easily download from the digital cameras, they manage their music collections (no corrupted iTunes libraries), and they use all the latest social media networks. Now they would both prefer to get a Mac, but that’s the really interesting part – they have no need for Windows.

We’re making progress. Ubuntu is leading the way.

So Dell and Canonical forced them into it – but they did it. I’m honestly shocked.

Linux has hit a critical mass. It may not be taking over the desktop world, but it has at least reached “Mac” support status.

http://blogs.computerworld.com/new_linux_broadcom_wi_fi_drivers_arrive

http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_852573C400693880002574CE00371FE1.html

I’m not sure UNIX in general is dead as AIX and I think even HP-UX have seen fairly strong growth recently, but Linux is certainly tearing up the industry like the good disruptor it is. I think another angle that was missed is the outstanding growth of Linux on Power and mainframe platforms – heck, even Sun has tried to put Solaris on an IBM mainframe.

Another point that is often overlooked is that a lot of Solaris migrations also go to Windows. It’s the drive to high volume platforms that triggers the shift.

However, aside from those minor conflicts in views, Jim Zemlin is right on. I think this quote says it all. It amazes me that any company would try to compete with that level of momentum head on and not try to join in on the growth opportunity. Just look at Red Hat’s earnings yesterday if you’re still skeptical.

By contrast, Linux is the overwhelming choice for new deployments on x86 systems, Zemlin says.  Sun has had its strength in applications such as ERP systems with a seven- to 20-year life cycle, he adds. “What’s starting to happen is those life cycles are starting to be completed,” and those customers are moving to Linux.

That move to Linux is accelerated by Linux’s strength in Web applications, where developers today are focused, Zemlin adds. “You can’t really talk to any Web-based application company these days that’s not using Linux,” he says.

And in other news, Oracle launched its own branded storage hardware product (made by HP) that is based on Linux. All around it’s been a positive day for accelerating growth of Linux.

And for those who haven’t registered, Ohio Linux Fest is coming up soon. I’m proud to say that IBM is once again the primary platinum sponsor (thanks for the funding Alena!). You can sign up here. I can’t say for sure yet, but it looks like Brian Warner from IBM’s Linux Strategy team will be joining me in person. If you’ll be present, send me an email and let’s meet up. There’s a great list of speakers for the event. I’ve never met Joe Brockmeier but I’m hoping to introduce myself at some point.

With Chiphopper, the process becomes fairly automated in discovering what needs changed before starting a port and makes it fairly easy to offer an application on multiple platforms. Developers use these tools on their x86 code so you don’t even need access to Power or mainframe hardware to use them.  You can even use the tools with open source applications.

Now IBM is offering these tools to any developer or customer that wants to port their x86/Linux application to Linux on Power or System z (mainframes). The IBM team has been collaborating with the Linux Foundation and I think some of the tools overlap with the LF’s LSB application testing tools. If fact, these tools can be used as a step toward LSB certification of your application.

The first set of tools used in the Chiphopper offering comes from the Linux Standard Base (LSB), a project of the Linux Foundation. When using standard interfaces, the developer can have confidence that these interfaces will be stable over time. Developers can focus on adding new functionality to enhance the application instead of having to rewrite over and over for changing interfaces. Developers can use the LSB Application Testkit Manager, located on the Linux Foundation Web site, to check whether the interfaces used by an application are part of an LSB standard.

I think you can expect to see an increase in KVM usage in RHEL going forward ;-)

I saw the press release here:

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20080904005327&newsLang=en

http://saviorodrigues.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/are-vendors-afraid-of-open-source/