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).

How long will it take for WordPress users to create a “sponsored by” plugin ;-)

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/10/05/technology/AP-US-TEC-Bloggers-FTC.html

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.

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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.

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”…

• 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…

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!.

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.

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.

…

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.

…

“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.

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.

 

You can read their post here.

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.

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.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/neodave/2752500743/sizes/l/

I’ve tried just about ever trick in the book to get my Canon just to print. Last year I gave up and finally just paid for TurboPrint. It’s a decent program and while it’s not cheap, it is cheaper than buying a new printer. Today they announced a new version 2 with updated features. Take a look if you’re interested. You can download the trial version first and check it out before paying.

I’m not sure what color management and color profiling services do exactly, but they may help with printing pictures. I haven’t seen a great solution for managing color, but perhaps they’ve “fixed the glitch”.  The other real challenge I’ve had is doing borderless printing…

New Features:

• color management
• status monitor with panel applet
• duplex printing
• print preview
• ink management & ink saving mode
• color profiling service

Well today it looks like my pain may be resolved. Adobe has let loose a 64-bit “alpha” version of Flash Player 10. I will be installing this promptly and report back, but in the meantime, you can get it yourself over here. You can read more about what’s new, etc at Adobe’s announcement page here.

Furthering Adobe’s commitment to the Linux community and as part of ongoing efforts to ensure the cross-platform compatibility of Flash Player, an alpha version of 64-bit Adobe Flash Player 10 for Linux operating systems was released on 11/17/2008 and is available for download. This offers easier, native installation on 64-bit Linux distributions and removes the need for 32-bit emulation. Learn more by reading the 64-bit Flash Player 10 FAQ.

Release versions of Flash Player 10 for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux are now available from the Flash Player Download Center.

Adobe, yes Adobe, is now proposing an open platform (built on a mobile version of Air) that would run applications from any carrier’s platform (albeit all those, closed). Now I’m intrigued. Will we finally see a shift from closed, single carrier channels to open if carriers adopt this strategy? And will Adobe of all companies actually lead the way?

Note, this does not mean the applications themselves or the governance of the channels by the carriers would be open, but at least the platform they run applications on could be. This would be a major change in an industry thus far plagued by closed, private and a thousand “one-off” generation implementations. Heck, even Linux mobile adoptions have been “one offs”.

I suspect the challenge here will come in testing these applications across an amazing number of devices and revisions, but if Adobe can replicate its strong Flash success on mobile platforms, perhaps we won’t be stuck in a Silverlight world ;-)

Meanwhile, Adobe is set to follow rival Apple into the mobile apps game, but is seeking to provide a common platform that will be supported across stores from many operators and vendors, rather than creating its own portal. The Flash maker, whose dominance of mobile video streaming is dented by Apple’s refusal to support the technology on the iPhone, will launch a mobile version of its Air product next year.

This will allow the same application to run across many cellphones, unlike its current mobile product, Flash Lite, which varies in implementation between different platforms. Kevin Lynch, Adobe’s CTO, said at Web 2.0: “Of all the technologies on mobile phones, none of them has more than a 50 per cent reach. As a developer, you have to implement your content about 400 times right now. That is a complete mess.”

Another point of interest is Adobe’s royalty free proposal. Adobe … will incent implementers to redistribute their implementations back? Adobe has seriously evolved its attitude… for the better.

For companies that agree to keep their implementations of Air open, so apps can be used from any online site, not just designated store, Adobe will eliminate royalties.