Archive for the 'Red Hat' Category
Friday, January 4th, 2008
AP Interview with Red Hat’s new CEO, Jim Whitehurst
I like Jim already after reading this interview.
“We are working to democratize information,” Whitehurst said. “A lot of people don’t see the importance of that. But, ultimately, it is about information freedom and making sure information’s accessible.
“If we don’t fight those battles now, our entrenched competitors will lock up file formats, force you to use their software or force royalties,” he added. “Then the information stored in those formats will no longer be free.”
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007
Insanely scalable filesystem service: SOFS
I just learned that in a Scale Out File Services (SOFS) solution a customer can implement a global filesystem (with clustering/replication) that has a maximum filesystem capacity of 33,554,432 Yobibytes. I actually had to look up Yobibyte. The maximum size for a single file is 16 Exibytes. That’s insanely scalable. Oh, and it’s all based on RHEL5 ;-)
The IBM website that has more info is available here.
Friday, December 7th, 2007
Comparing “open source” projects? Start by asking why does the project exist.
I’ve thus far made no mention of OpenDS and the wildfire reporting that has ensued, but there was one aspect of this situation I commented on to Stephen O’Grady and others on #redmonk when it came out that bugged me. It was a question: “how did it ever get to this point?”. How does a company – a profit seeking company, not a wild tongued developer – even get into an OpenDS situation? I believe the answer is that many people have wrongly assumed that the label “open source” indicates a project is disentangled from corporate affairs. Let me explain.
It’s not my place to determine whether any of the current buzz words today that mingle corporate led open code projects under various licensing and governance constructs are “right” or “wrong”, but I do have a strong opinion that the independent open source projects often have a leg up in building communities, participation, and multi-vendor investment (and often that’s their goal). I also think it’s foolish to expect any single company, commercially led project should behave in any manner other than a commercial business driven by stockholders would. I’m not defending or accusing Sun or any of the OpenDS developers; I’m focusing instead on what fundamental misunderstandings of “open source” may have led to all the hype that’s ensued.
I’ll start by saying I believe the “open” in “open source” projects is not well defined consistently and so confusion abounds when people compare “open source” X project to “open source” Y project. The compare is flawed in that each project may have a completely different reason for existence. Commercially run open source projects are inherently different from non-corporate, multi-vendor, open collaboration projects. That does not mean one is more “evil”, “good” or “bad” but rather that they’re apples and oranges. However, for whatever reason, the ability to view code has led to people lumping them together in the same classification called “open source”.
Linux and OpenSolaris are so different, I cringe whenever I hear people compare them (and yet I get dragged into doing comparisons myself to prove it’s not proper). It’s not that any one approach is by definition right or wrong – they have different reasons for existence. I do believe strongly that “Linux” is a great approach for its community’s goals – but Linux starts with a community, not a vendor’s goals. And so it becomes an issue when you compare a commercially driven project to a community led project – the reason for their existence is entirely different. There are different situations and goals that warrant a different project governance, control, license, and decision making construct for these projects.
Look at Eclipse. For full disclosure, I work at IBM. I’ve also only been at IBM since 2005 so Eclipse “happened” before my time. While Eclipse’ roots trace back to IBM, I don’t believe IBM had a single product that used Eclipse when it was “open sourced”. Some intelligent visionaries at IBM saw that the world needed an extensible IDE and platform for building out the next generation of desktop applications. Eventually Eclipse added Eclipse RCP and today IBM has Lotus Notes, Symphony, Rational, WebSphere and probably other Tivoli and IM tools and products built on Eclipse. Adobe, BEA, Borland, Oracle, SAP (competitors) are all “Strategic Members” of Eclipse and all have products that use Eclipse code (as do many other commercial software vendors). Did IBM intend to make money on Eclipse itself or intend to help its software competitors with code?
What was IBM’s goal then? Could it have been to disrupt the status quo, to change the landscape, foster open standards, build an ecosystem of investors, and ultimately move the industry forward? (something even a vendor as large as IBM could not do alone) I think we all know the answer to that. Just look at the results: a huge membership of Eclipse.org – look at how many of these for profit companies are using Eclipse in their own products. Could Eclipse’ structure be anything other that what it is to have the same impact? I don’t believe so.
Very few Eclipse “members” actually make money on selling the Eclipse code itself – they generate revenue using Eclipse in their products and extensions of the code. These members also reduce cost through collaborative, community based shared development. There are economic drivers and business value moving Eclipse forward. The revenue has moved from selling the IDE or RCP code to selling ancillary products/services leveraging and extending the code. What part of Eclipse Foundation does IBM own and control at Eclipse.org? Answer: None. How many times does “IBM” appear in the Eclipse Foundation Governance Bylaws? Answer: 0. With this independence, the Eclipse community has chosen Eclipse’ future, moving towards the needs of member users, towards innovative new developments, and ultimately has created a very malleable, extensible codebase upon with hundreds (maybe thousands) of products rely – whether IBM liked it or not.
It amuses me to see the OpenSolaris community now in a riff over Sun naming the Project Indiana OpenSolaris distro… well… OpenSolaris (second time’s a charm?). As a corporate company can decide, Sun has chosen to own and control all of the copyright and trademark IP, the Solaris architecture decisions, governance appears to “report” to Sun, Even the OpenSolaris community’s “Constitution” mentions Sun Microsystems, Inc. and is marked with a Sun copyright at the bottom. Sun employees hold 6 out of the 7 Governance Board seats, and all of the opensolaris.org infrastructure is owned and managed by Sun. Anyone who does contribute code must first sign over copyright to Sun, the company. This is not “like Linux” at all and it irks me when people compare them as if they’re similar products that should be compared.
So what standing does any “community member” have to tell Sun not to name Project Indiana what Sun wants to name it? This is not a “Foundation” or independent not for profit project. Sun is ultimately in this to make money on the productization of Solaris (why… after two years are there no competing commercial *Solaris distros as we see with Red Hat, Novell, Oracle, Ubuntu, etc?). The only group with standing to tell Sun what to do is Sun’s stockholders. It could only have been delusion or sheer blindness that led some community members to overlook that OpenSolaris has a different reason for existence and hence differing goals and mission as something like Linux. You cannot and should not compare them and you absolutely should not assume one “should be” like the other.
Look at the results. Start with how many people have contributed code to OpenSolaris (and look at what they’re contributing if you have time). OpenSolaris is Sun’s own project – I can confidently state there is no outside development of any significant substance directing the architecture of Solaris / OpenSolaris different from what Sun the company would have done anyway. Two “community developers” (Juergen Keil and Richard Lowe) account for nearly 40% of all accepted contributions – just two developers. Only 84 developers have contributed anything at all – ever (including small typos fixes, accepted or not). Outside contributors must have a Sun employee review, approve and integrate their code. And after two years, it seems some are starting to just realize, this Sun controlled model may not be the best approach. Those who do suddenly “wake up” have been relying on a false assumption. They assume OpenSolaris exists for them or should be like Linux or some other “open source” project they know about – and the reality is, it never was. It’s all about Sun’s stockholders.
What about Linux? There are approximately 2,000 Linux kernel contributors to each release alone (this does not include the massive work going on above the kernel). Looking at the commercial contributors to Linux, you will find a “who’s who” of IT and electronics vendors (also take a look at the LF membership). With Linux, copyright of the Linux kernel code is retained solely by the authors, there are many non-profit foundations supporting the components of a Linux distribution, and because decision making is merit based by community members, no one company controls (or stops) what goes in. Step back to the start of Linux and it’s obvious the intent for this project’s existence was very different than Sun had for OpenSolaris.
So returning to the subject of the post, I have come to the conclusion that much of the “open source” hype and “hurt feelings” are rooted in fundamental confusion about what “open source” means especially in single-vendor led and controlled projects. The only reason anyone should be surprised by anything Sun does with OpenSolaris, OpenDS, or any of the other Sun open source projects it controls, is because that person has fundamentally created an expectation that access to source code meant more than just that – and that is a flawed assumption.
Commercially led projects are created for commercial reasons. “Community members” should not force their own expectations on these projects or they’re likely to see disappointment, frustrations, and unnecessary hype when the company does something counter to what is expected. The same holds true for other companies as well, including IBM. Consider this Q&A about commercial project expectations from Stephen O’Grady back in June:
Q: Do you think that this Open Commercial Development represents an ideal hybrid of open source and commercial development philosophies?
A: It all depends on your expectations. If the idea is that some of the benefits of open source – be they community QA and bug reporting, feature suggestions, and so on – will be realized via this model, then yes. If the intent, however, is to build a vibrant, open source style community, a la Eclipse, then the answer is no, it isn’t.
It all starts with having the right expectation. Is Sun at fault on anything with OpenDS or OpenSolaris? Hey, no one’s perfect, but who can know for sure? Some may point to poor communication of its intent and goals for the projects (and improper comparisons to Linux). Too often I see Sun executives trying to position OpenSolaris as “like Linux”, but those who do research and homework, will likely understand the reality the hype-driving-community often ignores. Is this the “holy grail”, “silver bullet” answer to squash the hype? Absolutely not; communities will speculate forever. However, it’s easier to stay out of the hype if your message is consistent and clear.
You might be wondering what kicked off this massive post today? The answer is odd, but it was a quote from Bruce Perens in an El Reg article. In case any of the above post left my position to question, I agree with Bruce and this quote seems a great place to end.
“In general open source is only going to work if you let it be a community led project. Sun has had a hard time learning this, and some of their open source projects have had a hard time getting outside contributors, because Sun has insisted on owning the whole thing,” Perens said.
Tuesday, December 4th, 2007
Linux continues to evolve adding specialized purpose function into a general purpose OS
The great thing about Linux is that it’s a general purpose operating system that can be molded into a platform for anything from mobile devices, to printer embedded OS functionality to supercomputer and mainframes. Linux can also bring in certain features that may not apply to everyone but which cater to users with very specific needs. Like it or not as a mainstream security feature, SELinux has come quite far as evidenced in the latest RHEL5. SELinux also caters well to specific users with high security requirements. For those users, SELinux is probably easier to use than their other options and it is tailored to the needs they have.
Linux is now heading into another direction focusing on the specific needs for users with very low latency and determinism requirements. This can apply to anything from weapons systems for military applications, to Wall Street customers sell side trading systems, and even to SMS messaging in the telecommunications industry.
And so we’re beginning to see great strides shaping Linux for the needs of these user segments that demand low latency and determinism in both their operating system and applications. Platforms like IBM’s WebSphere Real Time and even Sun’s real time Java are currently running (or in Sun’s case, being ported to run) on a real time Linux operating system. With a real time Java machine, suddenly Java applications can inherit the benefits of a real time system. And so antiquated real time languages are suddenly… antiquated officially because a real time Linux and Java solution can marry a general purpose OS with a general purpose programming language for the best of both worlds. IBM has made great gains in the technology adding both a real time Java garbage collector and Ahead-of-Time compilation to make this a great solution compelling enough for the US Navy’s mission critical weapons systems.
Recently Novell has announced their SLERT product updates with great monitoring tools from Concurrent bundled in (and tighter integration of the kernel community real time patches – now a community standard?). I expect we’ll also soon hear more about Red Hat’s real time plans as well so stay tuned…
Friday, November 30th, 2007
Red Hat wows the CIO office: another #1 ranking in this year’s poll
Mr. Vaughan-Nichols has the coverage of the latest CIO Insight poll here. I think other vendors in the industry in Redmond and Santa Clara (heck, some perhaps in Armonk and Redwood Shores) will have to re-evaluate whether their products are delivering the same consistent business value, reliability and quality. In some respects it’s “easier” for Red Hat as they’re a one-product company and it’s in some sense easier to over-deliver when you’re focused on one product (yes, they have a couple products, but let’s be realistic, the revenue is all Linux). Regardless, this is a great story for Red Hat and hope to see them at the top of the list again next year.
For the fifth year, CIO Insight polled IT executives on how well their major vendors deliver business value, reliability and quality. This year’s winner? The No. 1 vendor? None other than Linux distributor Red Hat.
Perhaps even more impressive than Red Hat beating such name brand companies as Google and Hewlett-Packard was that Red Hat also earned a remarkable 97 percent loyalty rating.
Tuesday, November 13th, 2007
Fedora 8 sees strong first week adoption; but what will it take to quadruple or exponentially grow?
While the Fedora camp may be excited about 54,000 users, I have to admit given the stats I’ve seen 54K users is a small drop in the Linux user base ocean. I’m not sure exactly how they track this …
I’m actually one of those 54,000 users as I installed Fedora 8 on my home PC which now dual boots Fedora and Vista (solely for Photoshop and my Sony HD camcorder video editing). I actually replace Ubuntu Gutsy with Fedora to try out the new virtualization features in Fedora 8. I must admit, when it comes to virtualization, no distro comes close to Fedora (I tried Ubuntu 7.10 and OpenSuse 10.3). The polish, focus, and achievements with Xen and KVM are second to none. The Fedora 8 Virtual Machine Monitor is fantastic – worth testing the distro out alone. I have not (yet) seen any other distro port this with as many features available.
However, from an end user experience perspective, I would recommend every Fedora developer force themselves to use Ubuntu for the next month. The Ubuntu competition has a huge leg up on Fedora from a user experience perspective and it’s as if they don’t even know it (or Fedora has decided just to not care). For instance, just try watching an MPEG movie, try even finding how to use the licensed, paid for codecs, try listening to an MP3, try enabling 3D desktop with nVidia drivers, try customizing the 3D effects. When you need help, does the Wiki really help? Does the FAQ that is still stuck on Fedora 7 content apply? Fedora has now released quite a few well done releases – why are there still issues?
It truly was difficult to accept that Fedora was still as far behind as it was from an end user perspective. Now, I don’t want to scare anyone off – as a Linux user – I’ve grown accustomed to self help and working through these issues one by one. None are insurmountable and Fedora 8 is no more complicated for these things than Fedora 7. However, Fedora 7 should not be the bar against which you’re competing. I’ve said many times that Linux distros should ignore Windows and focus on the value Mac OS X offers its users (security holes, firewall issues, and upgrade dilemmas aside).
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007
Ohio LinuxFest 2007 was a LinuxSuccess
The crew organizing Ohio LinuxFest in their spare time… must be glad to have their spare time back this week! What a show, and what an effort by the regional Ohio LUGs that put on this event.
It’s been a few years since I last attended and at that time, I don’t believe I even registered – I just popped in, went to a few talks and left. But at that time there were maybe a couple hundred people there. I heard estimates that over 1,000 were in attendance although that figure seemed to underestimate the full number of people there. A couple of the speaker hall sessions were absolutely packed (and they were big halls). Ohio LinuxFest gives LinuxWorld a pretty big challenge. It was great to see all the regional corporate supporters but I was a bit surprised by all the “big IT” vendors with booths. There were sponsors from Google, IBM, HP, Novell, Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, Vyatta and even Sun (although they seemed to be using Linux to try getting visitors to listen to their Solaris story).
Some of the sessions were fantastic, others less so but on the whole, it was an outstanding lineup of speakers. “Maddog” was a speaker and did a great talk on computing off the grid. Grega… wow, what energy for usability. Somehow I ended up being an impromptu speaker at an “IBM Virtualization” session. I was followed by Alena from IBM who did a great job covering the details on how NationWide uses Linux on an IBM System z mainframe with z/VM for their mission critical web based systems. Alena had a last minute “laptop issue” (ahem… Windows) but we were able to copy her presentation onto an USB key and present from my Linux laptop (Linux saves the day… again).
The special prize for those who made it was the untold number of great ideas, best practices, and partnering or finding others in similar situations that these networking events create. I actually met someone with a similar background who went to law school and passed the bar, he moved to D.C. as an attorney and he’s now managing IT systems for the federal court systems. He was looking to start consolidating some of the applications they run in every court onto a central system (mainframe most likely).
Anyway, here’s an obligatory picture from the show (apologies for not having my good camera with me). I encourage anyone who will be near Columbus next year to check this event out – it was a great show, a great place to meet others working in the Linux/FLOSS arena, and overall a great time. And somehow this whole event is put on by volunteers – truly amazing.
Note the body density in this picture – this place was packed.
Wednesday, September 26th, 2007
ComputerWorld: “Novell’s Linux business climbs since its deal with Microsoft”
“The affect on sales year over year, for Novell’s first three quarters of our fiscal year, which ends Oct. 31 — our Linux business was up 243%,” said Justin Steinman, director of marketing at Novell, who, along with executives from both companies, spoke at a program hosted by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council.
Oddly this comes out just the day after Red Hat’s earnings which seem to have impressed investors:
Shares of Red Hat Inc. rose more than 4% Wednesday, one day after the company reported that its second-quarter profit rose 59%, and sales slightly beat Wall Street analysts’
The bottom line conclusion I see in these datapoints is Linux is flying off the shelves (or is that off the wires with downloads…) and growing quite well no matter what other companies try to do to impede its growth. The state of Linux is strong.
Monday, July 30th, 2007
SAP Certifies its NetWeaver Apps for RHEL 5 AP
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/070718/20070718005069.html?.v=1
Typical press release, however, noticed a couple things of interest:
1) It includes RHEL/Xen virtualization scenarios.
The certification includes the virtualization technology embedded in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 for use with SAP® applications.
2) SAP is writing its applications to take advantage of Linux specific technologies that may have once been reserved to legacy UNIX platforms:
Furthermore, it offers a complete solution stack through the integration of Red Hat Global File System (GFS), Cluster Suite, SELinux and further technologies for high availability, storage management and security.
Thursday, July 12th, 2007
InfoWorld: Windows loses ground with North America developers
A survey this spring of more than 400 developers and IT managers in North America found that the number of developers targeting Windows for their applications declined 12 percent from a year ago. Just 64.8 percent targeted the platform as opposed to 74 percent in 2006.
“We attribute [the decline] largely to the increase in developers beginning to target Linux and different Linux [distributions]. Both Novell and Red Hat are the two dominant ones right now,” said John Andrews, the CEO of Evans Data.
The arrival of Windows Vista likely only kept the numbers from being even worse. “I think Vista probably offset some of the decline,” Andrews said.
The share for Windows is expected to drop another 2 percent, to about 63 percent, in the next year, Andrews said.
Wednesday, June 27th, 2007
Congratulations Red Hat – Beats Wall St. Estimates (again)
http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=22739&hed=Red+Hat+Beats+Street
Red Hat on Wednesday reported first-quarter results that beat Wall Street expectations, an indication that corporate IT departments are slowly migrating from proprietary to open technology, the company’s chief executive said.
Linux growth overall, not just Red Hat’s specific gains, might be poised to do damage to Windows and the Unix operating systems. Pointing to his company’s last several years of growth, CEO Matt Szulik told Red Herring that an increasing number of companies are ready for Red Hat’s—and the Linux community’s—alternative operating systems.
Monday, June 25th, 2007
Meme Games: 3×3 Lessons for Open Source Firms
I was tagged by Stephen O’Grady… while I generally avoid replying to such meme’s, I then saw Luis replied and that put the rest of us tagged on the spot ;-) I am also replying because I probably see a different side of the equation that could potentially help others understand how the IBM-like vendors look at open source firms. Hopefully there may be at least a small level of insight that someone can benefit from in this response. I’ll put the usual disclaimers around this – take it “as is” with no express or implied warranties for fitness for any particular purpose (or merchantability).
I will preface that this meme is about “open source firms” which I assume means companies/profit seekers leveraging open source software as a model to grow – not those who take on the humble task of building free software in a non-commercial intent model (i.e. Apache, Eclipse). Having replied to this meme, I get to name the next round of victims. For that I will now tag Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth, kernel hacker Gerrit Huizenga who participates uniquely with other Linux firms in the community, and finally sogrady’s partner in crime over at Redmonk, Coté. So without further adieu, here’s my quick/dirty 3×3.
3 “Do”s:
1) Do Bring Crisp Customer Value to the Table: Define a value proposition beyond simply relying on being “open source” – there has to be some reason your value proposition is better (i.e. Firms in your industry constantly struggle to integrate X and Y while customizing for individual business units. Our open, modular architecture can be adapted to meet your individual business unit CRM requirements and integrate with X without expensive, lengthy customizations of the entire app) Hitting on a pain point of “closed” alternatives works well too – ask a PBX user how much they love their supplier(s)… turn the pain points (licensing, payment models, etc) into your value prop
2) Do Make Friends, Not Enemies: I once had a _smart*_ once tell me in an opening introductory sentence at an O’Reilly event his job was to use open source to wipe out millions of dollars of IBM’s business until IBM realized they’d have to buy him. That was his first sentence to me ever! – not “Hi, I’m XYZ from ABC, I’d like to find ways to partner with IBM”. The IT business is driven by partnerships, friendships, loyalties, acquaintances, and networking. If you are into open source to make a profit, partner like mad – if you position yourself as the enemy, expect to be killed or worse, ignored and slowly put out to pasture. The person who approached me in that manner is now struggling with the latter issue… I suspect his initial investors won’t hang around long as he still tries to make himself relevant.
3) Do Make the Right Friends – Partner with the Right Partners: The open source firms with a strong management team “get” partnering. They partner with other firms that can enable business and community growth. Just because someone like IBM invests millions in open source communities, Linux, and the community does not mean every open source firm should bet the farm on partnering with IBM. Yes, partnering with IBM has advantages, but IBM can also suck up your precious resources simply navigating the huge array of virtual teams. IBM may also have a differing strategy (and every strategy out of IBM is not necessarily the one that wins in market – you can be different). As an open source firm, your goal is to find the right partners who are naturally aligned for partnering with you. Don’t accept partnerships that have no investment on one side – they’re doomed. Both sides must be aligned and invested. How will your partnership not only create more business for you, but also generate new revenue or reach a new customer base for your partners. I’ve had this discussion with the head a particular open source firm on a few occasions – partnering is by definition mutual – how do we both benefit from partnering? (otherwise, I can’t justify investment and maybe I’m not the right partner for you) Another IBM partner with an open source product just closed another round of investment for ~$25M – they know how to partner in a mutually beneficial model. There will be a lot of news coming in this space…
3 “Do not”s:
1) Do Not Shy Away from Being a Commercial Business – too often companies pitch how “open” they are. While that’s great, how do you make money? It’s as if some open source firms are afraid to discuss how they make money off of free software (free as in speech). This is usually a good way for vendors to weed out the bad firms – if the firm is shy about discussing this, they probably have a weak value prop, and there’s probably more of a “hidden hook” to make customers pay than offer something customers want to pay for. IBM has for a long time been investing substantially in Linux, open standards/source based software, and open source communities – I can’t recall an executive who did not clearly, up-front, and simultaneously articulate how IBM generates revenue from any of those ventures. If you set the tone up front, no one will be surprised or upset later. And if you have a strong value prop – see point 1) – customers will expect your valuable product/service comes at a reasonable price. And one last point is “free as in beer” only gets you one round – downloads do not magically turn into profit later. I don’t care if you have 8M downloads – while that’s great for showing loose interest in your technology, how many are paying you? How many have built a dependency in their applications on your technology? How are you going to generate the revenue needed to fund the next version of your technology?
2) [If you are trying to be the standard as in platform], Do Not Try to Control/Dominate/Dictate an “open” Community Project. I’m not talking about MySQL here – they’re an application/database component. Rather, think about platforms like operating systems, dynamic server languages, portable runtimes, etc. that customers use as platforms to build on. There are many of these succeeding today (RHT, NOVL, PHP, Apache, Eclipse to name just a few). There are others that may have an open source license, but the firm tries to dominate with restrictions and provisions in contributor agreements, including hidden hooks in license terms, or by bundling in non-free (as in speech) components. These firms typically then claim to be leaders and their platform is growing in adoption … yet for some reason… no one partners with them – see point 2) – and they carry the entire development expense with no community-scaling benefits. They invest the R&D and in the end, their “community platform” is just another vendor product that rings well with the vendors existing customers. Consider Eclipse – while it may have started with IBM dominating the “participant list”, it takes a serious approach to vendor-neutrality and open participation for BEA, Oracle, Sybase, Zend, Actuate, Compuware, SAP, CA, and Borland to all join IBM on the Strategic vendors list. The same applies to Linux – look at the Linux Foundation membership list.
3) Do Not Ignore Intellectual Property; Do Not Let Intellectual Property Stifle Your Innovation – First, you cannot ignore the effects and implications of intellectual property decisions. First, there’s the license – not all software must be GPL, but there are serious, practical issues if you decide to create the “XYZ Corp Open Source License v1.0″. License appropriately for the type of developer and user community you’re trying to foster. Second, patents – take a political stance, but don’t get caught staring at the clouds waiting for Congress. File for patents if you can, what you do with them after is up to you, but the Patent Commons, OIN, or some other entity is a great place to house them. Also, don’t be stupid and violate an obviously valid patent. If you’re starting an open source project in a technology area that has established players – hire an attorney to guide you through the minefield. It can be done. Third, figure out the trademark situation. Badgeware is one issue, but not creating a trademarked identity that your “open community” can use in viral marketing and “I’m proud to be an XYZ-user” situations is sheer nonsense. You need to establish legal trademarks, then set clear guidelines for trademark usage up front, make it open, and don’t use your trademark to make people pay you – IMO it’s a poor business practice and creates unnecessary frustration later on. And finally, don’t let IP hold you up. Everyone knows this field is wrought with nonsense and arcane approaches to IP. If you can create value, just hire a reasonable IP attorney to walk you through the field. Take some basic steps to be safe, but don’t spin wheels and tie up valuable resources trying to analyze (or let an attorney make you analyze) every conceivable, possible, extreme angle. IP generally comprises of Patents, Copyrights, Trade Secrets, and Trademarks – use them wisely.
If I had a 4×4 meme, I’d also cover open standards and the importance to lead in driving these open standards as part of your model (see what happened with Spring for instance).
Monday, June 18th, 2007
Europes top optician, Specsavers migrates EVERYTHING to Red Hat Enterprise Linux
URL: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39287602,00.htm?r=1
Did you ever wonder why Microsoft and Sun are creating as much FUD about Linux as possible these days? Here’s something you don’t see that often, but represents the value companies are reaping from Linux. A market leader in Europe is migrating everything to Linux – Windows and Solaris all migrating to Linux. An interesting point was that Vista pushed them into this direction!
And what server hardware are they running their operations on? Fujitsu-Siemens, Intel based servers (yes, they’re supposed to be the “other half” of the Solaris/SPARC equation..). This is a great story for Linux and for Red Hat.
Who are they?
Specsavers has been voted Britain’s most trusted optician by Reader’s Digest, and claims to be the market leader in contact lenses. It is also the largest provider of home-delivery contact lenses in Europe.
What are they doing?
Britain’s leading optician, Specsavers, has migrated from Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in all its 830 stores.
The chain says it has already seen a reduced need for maintenance and improved reliability in a radical across-the-board shift from Windows 2000 to the open-source operating system, with some sources quoting a six-figure sum in licence-fee savings alone. The company is also phasing out Sun’s Solaris on its head-office servers in favour of Red Hat.
“With our new store system, every single business-critical application is running on Red Hat, from the till to the test-room hardware,” said Nigel Spain, Specsavers’ global architecture manager. “We were convinced that Linux would have a major positive impact on our business and Red Hat has delivered exactly what it promised.”
Wednesday, June 6th, 2007
Fedora 7 based Systemtap LiveCD
Will Cohen at Red Hat has recently put out a Fedora 7 based LiveCD with a fully installed SystemTAP built in. You can download this LiveCD here:
ftp://sourceware.redhat.com/pub/systemtap/livecds/Fedora-7-systemtap-20070606.iso
Tuesday, June 5th, 2007
Details, details… hurts your credibility??
Otherwise “ok” (in this case, not outstanding either) articles often have a small point that just make me cringe… for instance, look at this quote from the article I just linked to…
“The FSF controls the licensing process around open-source software.”
Thursday, May 31st, 2007
Fedora 7 looks good – really good
I have to try this out. The artwork and polish on the interface look fantastic although in the past I’ve found Fedora to be lacking in the “actually works” department. I’ll post once I’m done testing this.
http://fedoraproject.org/?sc_cid=bcm_bnrhpfedora_055
Monday, May 14th, 2007
Bill Hilf… misquoted or misinformed?
I saw this article today and have to wonder if Bill is either misquoted or just severely misinformed…
The Free Software movement is dead,” Hilf said, in a typical quip, as quoted in “The Bangkok Post.” “Linux doesn’t exist in 2007. Even [Linux creator] Linus [Torvalds] has a job today.”
I’m curious if he was just misquoted, but that does happen. Obviously that was a terribly poor judgment as the free software movement is most certainly alive and well, and there are more people working on Linux than just IBM, Oracle, and Canonical. Bill, take a look at who really contributed to the 2.6.20 kernel Bill - there are many contributors (nearly 2,000 had code accepted just into the 2.6.20 kernel). The free software ecosystem is actually growing further – and many of the participants are Microsoft’s own long time partners. And yes, many of them do make a living (it’s hard to code Linux kernel code while wandering and asking for money on the streets). That is actually Microsoft’s real problem – these guys (and gals) are making a living – it’s an economically self-sustaining model. Sure, they are not making $92M/day like others, but they make a living and enjoy what they do.
Maybe that’s what has Microsoft so afraid that they’re reverting to their usual tricks (e.g. not competing on technology). After all, there used to be a huge force of Wintel+Dell, but even that partnership has changed…
Consider this: Google, IBM, HP, Dell, Intel, AMD, Novell, Red Hat, Oracle, Sun, SAP, Accenture, China, India, Ingram Micro, Tech Data, Avnet, vast numbers of global and local resellers, consultants, ISVs, and system integrators are all making vast fortunes for their shareholders off of Linux. Will the industry just let FUD tricks stand in their way??? Heck no, this industry invented FUD and certainly knows how to defeat it.
The real problem is that the industry is already defeating it. The MS monopoly is under attack from all sides: ODF, Linux Desktop, Linux server, Adobe RIA, Eclipse RCP, etc, etc and I see these latest threats as last resort efforts from a company clearly concerned about its long term growth. That’s a natural response, but another way to compete is to just fix your products and deliver something your customers want.
Wednesday, May 9th, 2007
Rant for the day: Red Hat Requires Windows Media Player??? Sun… is Sun…
Why on earth does Red Hat’s investor relations require Windows Media Player to view their corporate analyst day webcast? Can anyone explain the sense in this? I’m using RHEL5 Desktop right now and I can’t watch Red Hat’s own webcast from their website??? Red Hat officially recommends users boot into Windows??
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?p=irol-eventDetails&c=67156&eventID=1545643
In other news, Red Hat also announced its plans for Red Hat Global Desktop (which apparently does not allow users to view Red Hat’s investor relations webcasts)
This is only slightly less absurd as Sun’s latest campaign that “Solaris is a better Linux than Linux”… no, I think Linux is actually quite fine at being Linux… ;-) I think Sun has split personalities – Sun executives like to point out all the faults they think there are with Linux, sometimes they dress up in Penguins suits, yet they want to be more like Linux… huh?
Monday, April 30th, 2007
Linux/SELinux vs Solaris 10 + Trusted Extensions
Definitely worth the read if your curious about topics like SELinux and Solaris Trusted Extensions…
http://mentalrootkit.org/?p=16
The biggest misconception [sic] is that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is a “trusted operating system”. It is not and hopefully never will be. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a general purpose operating system that can meet the same requirements that traditionally required a special-purpose trusted operating system. This distinction may seem small, but it has large implications on the relevance and long-term viability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SELinux.
Monday, April 23rd, 2007
eWeek: Linux Kernel Reaps the Fruits of Real-Time Technology
Linux with realtime extensions is going to be quite popular once companies realize all the benefits never before achievable (cost effectively). IBM and Red Hat have been aggressively developing real time extensions and if you’re in telco, financial or federal sectors, you should definitely take a look for any applications that require or desire guaranteed transaction determinism.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2121087,00.asp
“The real-time upstream kernel work is a mainstream community initiative and is all about determinism and latency, about being able to have guarantees that transactions will complete within finite periods of time and that the highest priority processes and applications will be able to run without being pre-empted by lower priority applications or low level system services.”
– Tim Burke, Red Hat
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