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/

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?

A great quote from Bob Sutor:

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!.

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…

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.

Every now and then IBMers know we’ve clearly done something the competition is unlikely to ever catch up to even if we let them know it’s working. The numbers below speak for themselves. It takes commitment to drive change. To use a poker reference, if you know the odds are in your favor, go all in pre-flop or someone without the odds will potentially take you out on the river card. If Sun had a real Linux strategy, this could be Linux on UltraSPARC Tx. If HP had a real processor strategy, this could be Linux on Superdome.

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2223362/virtualisation-booming-ibm

The company is reporting a threefold increase in the number of virtualised Power Systems servers sold. Sixty four per cent of Big Blue’s customers opted for a virtualised Linux setup on the new servers, compared to just 21 per cent a year ago.

“Even I was stunned by the uptake,” admitted Scott Handy, IBM’s vice president of Power Systems.

Here’s the report: ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/linux/pdfs/GCG_IBM_and_Linux-9_years_later.pdf

The opening teaser:

In 1999, IBM issued a series of announcements fully committing the company to supporting Linux. IBM vowed to Linux-enable all of their hardware platforms, including their non-x86 based mainframe, mini, and RISC-based systems. They also promised to release Linux versions of their software products and develop
Linux-centric service practices. Moreover, they pledged significant resources to the Linux community with the goal of advancing Linux and open source technology.

So, nine years later, did IBM deliver on these promises? Was their commitment to Linux genuine or just lip service? This report examines IBM’s current Linux products, services, and community support in light of the promises they made in 1999…

While I think it’s obvious IBM has been a huge investor in the Linux community, one thing that I noticed reading the report is just how much IBM is actually different from other community members. There are some noticeable differences in the investments and approach to supporting the Linux platform and community. I often forget to just take in all the Linux technologies IBM has been heavily involved in from Xen, KVM and libvirt to filesystems, to systemtap, kprobes and then there’s RAS, scalability and performance enhancements.

Another interesting thought to reflect on is just how important it has been that there are multiple investors in this field. If this report captures just what IBM did, think of the industry combined. IBM couldn’t have done anything this big with Linux if it weren’t for co-creating with a community of enthusiasts, researchers, governments, Intel, AMD, Google, Nokia, Motorola, Oracle and thousands more. What would the report look like if you compiled all the investments and work the entire community leveraged across the industry. Linux is “bigger than huge” when you stop to think about it. This is also why I’ve said for a couple years now when you extend the investment model 3 to 5 years into the future, Sun and its anti-Linux,  Solaris push against the tide of the industry loses in the end. I think we’re starting to witness that now. Sure, OpenSolaris is a great idea… it’s just 9 years late and it’s too late to matter now.

I’m interested in outside perspectives too – where do you think IBM stands? Has the community development and investment model worked? Where will this lead in the future and what will be the next evolution of the model? Red Hat seems to think the model will evolve to include increased customer co-creation – I tend to agree. Why? Because the incentive model to invest aligns very well – and when you have alignment, it almost naturally will happen.

Let’s break a record…

UPDATE: The site is back up if you were experiencing download issues earlier.

Add in real time Java and you have a fully deterministic stack.

16 percent of all U.S. institutional equity commissions are exposed to latency risk, totaling $2 billion, according to a new report from the TABB Group.

http://www.tabbgroup.com/PublicationDetail.aspx?PublicationID=346

http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/feed/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208400864&cid=RSSfeed_WST_All

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-ext4/index.html?ca=drs-

There’s a great summary table of the new features. Remember though, ext4 is still labeled experimental.

Ext4 is the latest in a long line of Linux® file systems, and it’s likely to be as important and popular as its predecessors. As a Linux system administrator, you should be aware of the advantages, disadvantages, and basic steps for migrating to ext4. This article explains when to adopt ext4, how to adapt traditional file system maintenance tool usage to ext4, and how to get the most out of the file system.

You can register here:

https://www-950.ibm.com/events/wwe/grp/grp017.nsf/agenda?openform&seminar=692H5MES&locale=en_US/

Did I mention it only runs Linux?

Ashlee Vance cracks me up – it’s clear from this article he’s been talking to vendors for two long (see the last sentence in this quote):

The system itself is quite remarkable. IBM has reworked its approach to rack servers allowing it to place twice as many systems in a single cabinet. This attack centers on delivering the most horsepower possible in a given area while also reducing power consumption. IBM hopes the iDataPlex unit will attract today’s service providers buying thousands and tens of thousands of servers and also big businesses such as oil and gas firms and media companies that will also possibly pursue a grid-ish data center computing model pioneered to some degree by Google.

But the really awe inspiring bit of iDataPlex comes from the fact that IBM is willing to go after this market at all and that it did so without screwing up the hardware design.

Ars covered the details as well over here:

“Adobe’s decision to join the LF is a natural extension of its commitment to open standards and open source, which demonstrates its leadership and foresight in the software industry,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “Adobe’s membership will contribute to our goal of increasing even more application development on Linux with a specific emphasis on Web 2.0 applications.”

“Adobe delivers key RIA technologies for Linux users, such as Adobe® Flash® Player and now Adobe AIR™, to deploy RIAs in the browser and on the desktop,” said David McAllister, director of standards and open source at Adobe. “The Linux Foundation is a valuable resource, providing a forum where we can work with the community to ensure Adobe RIA technologies are compatible across the Linux software platform.”

This makes perfect strategic sense for Adobe. I can’t wait to see more Adobe desktop apps running on Linux. Adobe will be at the LF Summit and I believe are participating in DAM.

Press release here: http://linux-foundation.org/weblogs/press/2008/03/30/adobe-joins-linux-foundation-with-focus-on-linux-for-web-20-applications/ 

http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Jobs#Linux_Foundation_Community_Manager 

Linux Foundation Community Manager

Linux Foundation Community Manager

We’re looking for world class talent to join the non-profit organization that is accelerating Linux. If you’re passionate about Linux, there is no better place to work. We have a unique opportunity for the right individual to make a huge difference in Linux.

The Community Manager must have both a technical and business view of key issues facing Linux and can do the following:

• Organize workgroups by galvanizing member leaders and participants. Push agendas on calls and in Collaboration Summit meetings. Recruit the right people and enable them to lead the workgroups. This person will be the LF liaison between us and our members.
• Build community in these workgroups and in the general LF online presence by writing content, recruiting volunteers to write content and managing new web properties and strategies. This is a chance for you to be creative and be a thought leader.
• Be a technical source for Linux issues for LF management and prepare them for press and speaking opps in specific areas of expertise.
• Handle details around LF workgroups and advisory councils. You will own these groups so you are responsible for everytihng, down to the details. If you’re used to a large staff to handle details for you, this is probably not the right job for you.
• Assist LF staff with conference and events. This could be writing and leading workgroup sessions, recruiting the right people, speaking at conferences, etc.
• Assist engineering in LSB content and community. (Moderating forums, recruiting participants, etc. for a new Web property.)
• You must understand the Linux ecosystem, especially server-related Linux issues, and be technical. (You don’t have to be a kernel programmer but you need to know who they are individually. If someone says GCC you know what that means.)
• You need to be able to express yourself in writing but just as importantly you need to be able to organize and run a meeting. You need to be able to do details and get things done but also have a big picture view.
• You have to be politically savvy and understand motivations and sensitivities of divergent people and groups.
• Web programming or at least a high proficiency in new web strategies is preferred.

If you’d like to apply for this job, please send your resume to angela (at) linux-foundation (dot) org.

Linux security experts are reporting a growing list of real-world security situations in which the US National Security Agency’s SELinux security framework contains the damage resulting from a flaw in other software. These so-called “mitigations” are showing that a Linux feature that began as an esoteric security measure is starting to prove its worth.

The article also references Dan Walsh’s LiveJournal entry here.

Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
6:30pm-8:00 PM
IBM
590 Madison Ave, 12th Floor
corner of 57th Street
** RSVP Closes at 4:30pm the day of the meeting (sharp!) ***
Please RSVP for EVERY meeting at this time.
Register at http://rsvp.nylug.org/

PLEASE NOTE: This meeting is at IBM, not Google!

Jim  Gleason – on – The Next Wave of Virtualization

Kernel-based Virtual Machine and its impact on the desktop Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a Linux kernel virtualization infrastructure and open source hypervisor that provides both full and para-virtualization capabilities for Linux on commodity x86 hardware that contain the virtualization extensions from Intel and AMD.  KVM is currently implemented as a loadable Linux kernel module.  In late 2006, it was first included in Linux kernel 2.6.20 and and first shipped with OpenSuse 10.1 and Fedora 6.

Since KVM is part of Linux, KVM leverages the scheduler, memory management and other key resources in the Linux kernel, unlike VMware and Xen which must create their own custom mechanisms. Thus, KVM development focuses exclusively on the next-wave virtualization, while Xen and VMWare must also maintain these ‘forked’ non-Linux resources.

All of the core KVM developers, including Avi Kavity, work at the firm, Qumranet, which launched a desktop virtualization solution called Solid ICE that leverages KVM.  Qumranet is the creator, maintainer and global sponsor of the KVM Open Source Hypervisor Project.  Other high-ranking Linux kernel developers such as Rusty Russell and Anthony Liguori of IBM, Ingo Molnar of Red Hat, and Andrea Archangeli formerly of Novell, devote most of their time to KVM development.

What is the Next Wave of Virtualization?

Qumranet has gone beyond conventional server virtualization and application streaming by completely virtualizing end users’ desktop machines.  From a browser on a thin client or PC, users access their desktop work environment over the network via a virtual machine running on a centralized server.  The end result is a seamless end user work experience, just like a physical PC on a LAN. This is a high-level talk which will focus on the breakthrough Linux technology KVM, and its impact on the virtualization market.

About Jim Gleason:
Jim has been providing emerging technology to early adopters in the Financial Serivces Sector for the past ten years.  Widely regarded as the person who brought Linux to Wall Street, Jim sold the first production Linux cluster to Goldman Sachs in 1998.  Jim was also an early Internet pioneer having closed deals for the first official web sites of Charles Schwab, VISA, and all of Hewlett-Packard’s original web sites in 1993. Jim is also the Founder of the NY Linux Users Group and currently works at Qumranet in the capacity of Vice President of Sales.

Meeting Location:
Please note that this meeting will be held at IBM, 590 Madison Ave, 12th floor, corner of 57th Street, and not at Google.  This is the building with the IBM logo on the front of the building.

Map:
http://tighturl.com/m

Books!!!
Our friends at Prentice-Hall kindly provide us with review copies of various new titles.  One of these could be yours, all you have to do is agree to review the book within a reasonable period of time.

ComputerWorld

Satyadas said IBM thinks that this year, it will happen. “All the stars are lining up,” he said. “Everybody has been saying that since 2001 except IBM. We never said that, but we are saying that now.”

Matt Asay’s Cnet Blog

It’s easy to overlook IBM’s announcement that its Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony suites will run on Ubuntu. I think this would be a mistake. IBM is not a dumb company. It’s not in the habit of wasting resources. For IBM to be partnering up with Ubuntu says something about the enterprise mindset on Ubuntu.

InformationWeek

By porting key software to Linux, IBM is looking to give businesses one less reason to buy products from rival Microsoft — which IBM said offers “a proprietary desktop model.” IBM’s Linux efforts will “further address customer demands around choice,” said Inna Kuznetsova, an IBM executive with responsibility for Linux, in a statement.

I read this news release with great excitement and will take a shameless opportunity to plug what I think is a fantastic partnership. The news? IBM’s Lotus group has announced support of its Open Collaboration Client Solution (OCCS) for Ubuntu Linux. OCCS is a layer of rich client communications apps including IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 (Calendaring, Email), Sametime 7.x (Instant Messaging), and Symphony (OpenOffice in an Eclipse RCP form). I’ve switched to Ubuntu for my primary system at home for well over a year now and while I took a very short break to dabble in Fedora 8, I’m back on Ubuntu again. I’ve been using a RHEL5 base at work for over a year as well but now that we have Ubuntu support coming, I’ll probably switch to Ubuntu once the OCCS solution is released (yes, I work in a strategy group in IBM and I don’t use Windows or MS Office – and most people can’t tell). The thing about working in IBM is that everyone uses Notes, Sametime, and ODF is even becoming more popular so there’s very little that prevents anyone from using Linux (or a Mac). Heck, many users can probably get away with an iPhone.

IBM also expanded the OCCS platform support with Red Hat EL Desktop and announced more partners around OCCS on Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED).

What makes all this even better? Enterprise applications delivered in a rich client environment. Take for instance SAP, who today announced a joint product set with IBM that will be delivered through Lotus Notes (which we now know runs well on Linux)

The product, codenamed Atlantic, will allow users to access SAP’s Business Suite applications for workflows, reporting and analytics through IBM’s Lotus Notes desktop software.

So the ecosystem and vision is starting to come together. It’s early, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention again that 2008 will be the year of the enterprise Linux client ;-) How many users will we be saying this for? :-) (Note, I didn’t say ‘desktop’ specifically, and I said ‘enterprise’). As we’ve been saying all along, there are certain segments of users that can easily do their work on a Linux client (many won’t even know it’s not Windows). Those companies who take advantage of user segmentation have a lot to benefit from both on pure cost alone, but also in the next round of negotiations on your non-Linux client systems ;-)

Now you may watch the video and then wonder ‘what the heck does this imply for the server market?’ and you’d be right to ask. Interestingly, Scott Handy from IBM recently did an interview with The Register and gave everyone the answer. The processor marketplace for desktops, laptops, mobile devices and servers requires huge volumes to provide economic returns to manufacturers. There is a huge capital investment that goes into every generation of processor not to mention all the IP that must be created to advance from one generation to the next. Similar to software sold on CD, producing the first chip may cost $1B and the second chip $500M, and it only gets cheaper as your volumes increase. In order to maintain a processor business profitably, chip makers live off volumes (hence the huge battles between Intel and AMD). Now the problem facing Intel for Itanium and Sun for SPARC is that these server technologies have no consumer application that will drive additional volumes. In terms of volume, the server market is a spec in chip consumption.

Yet the processor market is a rat race – vendors need enormous chip volumes to provide funding for future chip designs and whoever has the most funding, tends to produce the winning chips (see Intel for years despite competition from AMD). In fact one might point to Itanium as Intel’s decline – a chip that never saw the volumes needed to make it a competitive chip. Then as Intel was divesting profits from its x86 chips into Itanium chips, it suddenly found itself behind AMD. For a good grin, take a look at IDC’s forecasts for Itanium and the ‘revisions’ to those estimates. Heck, probably the only person to have worked around Itanium and advanced their career was Ashlee Vance.

Now look at Sun and SPARC and you see what used to be a high volume SPARC or UltraSPARC platform with many 1-4 way SPARC servers going into every datacenter giving Sun ‘good enough’ volumes to invest in future generations of processors. Then comes along Intel and Linux and Windows wiping out low end SPARC volume servers and cornering SPARC processors into a lower volume mid-high end server market. Without the funds for future generations of chips, Sun has to resort to stopgap measures craftily using old SPARC core designs in a Niagara multicore processor configuration. Regardless, that still doesn’t create high volume – the non-x86 server market is actually relatively low volume.

When you look at Power processors in everything from Mars rovers to cars, servers, printers and today it’s used in all 3 gaming systems (Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii). The gaming market alone consumes tens of millions of processors (far more than the server market). The Cell BE processor in the PS3 and IBM or Mercury Cell blades actually have 1 power core (PE) and 8 synergistic processing units (SPEs). The PE acts as a ‘router’ for instructions and data sent to the SPEs. So an application developer write much of the code similar to a power architecture when targeting a Cell based system. (Now I’m oversimplifying processor architectures a ton here, I’ll admit – but the point is not to debate the differences between PowerPC/POWER and Cell PE/SPE units… look at the big picture).

Now, going back to servers you can understand that winning in servers requires a high volume chip that funds future chip development and generates economic profits for the manufacturer. Without funds to invest in future chips, you lose the race. Once you view it all in this light, it becomes easier to see why the Power, ARM and Intel/AMD x86/x64 architectures are far ahead of other RISC or other architectures – they have volume. POWER6 was no small ‘speed bump’ – POWER6 is a fierce chip with raw compute power and system throughput that leapfrogged its competitors. It took economic profits reinvested into chip design over years to create it. Cell is no different. And with Cell and Power having volumes in non-server markets including now potentially Toshiba laptops and TVs, I’ll leave you to place your bets on which architectures will be around in the server market for years to come.

Oh, and I should also note that Linux is the only OS that runs on both the Cell BE and POWER processors ;-) Guess which OS is likely to be around in your next generation server, television, printer and … well if only we could ‘fix’ the desktop/laptop market reliance on a different OS…

The second is an article over at IBM’s developerWorks on “Multiprocessing with the Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS)”. If you have been paying attention to LKML over the last year you’ve seen plenty on this. CFS is a great new addition to the Linux kernel and Avinesh did a great job covering the new CFS features, rationale, data structures and finally how to actually use it. I also noticed a fair (pun intended) credit to Con Kolivas for being the one to prove fair scheduling could be done without wreaking havoc. Con’s frustration with getting his patches accepted has been well publicized, but it looks like his contribution will live on in the CFS code.

Some of these changes were made for these reasons:

• To enable better scheduling for servers as well as for desktops.
• To provide new features that were requested.
• To improve the heuristics. Those used in the vanilla scheduler made some attacks easy to implement. Also, if the heuristics gauged a scenario incorrectly, unwanted behaviors could result.