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Sun is pondering an open source codec. No they’re really working on it.
It even has a name. Open Media Stack. Part of the Open Media Commons initiative. Oh, it’s royalty free. Look, here’s a blog post. And a news release. (And a diagram, from the blog post.) The way to get to a royalty-free codec is to start with H.261, a video compression standard approved in 1989, outside the 17-year patent window. They can’t look at H.264 (used in MPEG4) because that requires payment of royalties. So we go back a full human generation and grow from there. Probably with Xith Vorbis. All of which sounds wonderful, except for one thing. Who’s paying for all this work? Sun indicates it’s contributing, but how long will it take for them to replicate 20 years of codec progress on its own? And who is helping? Asked all these interesting questions at last week’s Open House Rob Glidden, global alliance manager for TV & Media at Sun, made an unintentioned funny. “Stay tuned,” he said. Smells like open source FUD to me. Now wait, you say. Unfair, you say. Great projects start with a vision and a sponsor. Here Sun is offering both. Plus a structure in which to get it done. Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events, from Amazon.comAll true. But with no clue on budgets, and no timelines, we’re also staying tuned while the world goes on without us. Those royalty-bearing codecs aren’t sitting still, and there are royalties to fund their development. I would be far less skeptical and snarky on this if, say, Google were making the announcement. They have the money and bodies to get this done lickety-split. I’m just afraid that with Sun we might be talking more Lemony Snicket. Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for nearly 25 years. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations. Original link: http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-sour... That has emerged as the question, or at least a major factor in determining whether open source software works in the enterprise systems management market.
The three open source players that have managed mid-market and enterprise customer growth — GroundWork Open Source, Hyperic and Zenoss — all base their products, both community and enteprise versions, on software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The three systems management ventures that have faltered recently — Levanta, Open Country and Qlusters — did not use GPL licensing. Levanta and Open Country did not even offer community or free versions. While Qlusters opened its QRM software in 2006, it did not emphasize its free version, which is now in the hands of the openQRM developer community. Open Country and Qlusters did base their products on open source software that was licensed under the Mozilla Public License with attribution. This is not to say MPL does not work in the enterprise (see systems management project Ziptie, licensed under the MPL). However, when looking at these six companies and considering their differences, the GPL licensing stands out. Other prominent factors are the functionality focus (monitoring seems to be a gap in current offerings and competition, compared to provisioning, patching and other systems management subcategories) and interoperability with and support of Windows and other proprietary software. This is not to say GPL licensing + monitoring = enterprise systems management revenue. There are other examples of ventures based on open source software, such as OpenESM, that are both GPL and centered on monitoring, yet never took off. However, when we look at the newest open source systems management ventures — OpenNMS Group, Nagios Enterprises and Paglo — we see that these community-driven commercial plays are sticking with what works: the GPL. Original link: http://blogs.the451group.com/ope... Over the weekend Stuart Hicks emailed the OSI about an odd statement made by McAfee in its white paper on botnets [PDF]:
Taking the bot controller offline may kill a botnet. As a result, many bots use a Dynamic Domain Name System (DDNS) or have a list of backup IP addresses to survive such an event. Bot technology is rapidly evolving, often aided and abetted, unfortunately, by the open-source movement. [Emphasis mine.] Huh? No justification is made for this statement. No follow-on, explanatory comments are made. Someone at McAfee thinks that the correlation between botnets and open source is clear, but I am struggling to grasp any connection between the two. Perhaps this is just one more example of McAfee's dubious grasp on reality when it comes to open source. Remember its statement that open-source licensing is a threat to its business? Consider the definition of a botnet: While the term "botnet" can be used to refer to any group of bots, such as IRC bots, the word is generally used to refer to a collection of compromised computers (called zombie computers) running programs, usually referred to as worms, Trojan horses, or backdoors, under a common command and control infrastructure. The majority of these computers are running Microsoft Windows operating systems, but other operating systems can be affected. A botnet's originator (aka "bot herder") can control the group remotely, usually through a means such as IRC, and usually for nefarious purposes. See any open source in there? I suppose it's possible that the programs used to manage the zombies could be open source, but the zombies themselves are generally Windows computers. Apparently open-source Linux is more impervious to bot attacks. Or maybe its users are simply not as gullible. Or something. Regardless, McAfee needs to come clean and own up to its ignorance on open source. It's starting to look ridiculous. Too bad it can't keep that proprietary. No one likes to see their ignorance open sourced. Original link: http://www.cnet.com/8301-13505_1... Everyone grumbles about Linux driver problems, but kernel hacker Greg Kroah-Hartman actually did something about it. Kroah-Hartman created a program by which open-source developers would create drivers for hardware vendors even if their equipment was proprietary. Over a year later, though, Kroah-Hartman has found that the vast majority of hardware OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) already offer Linux support. As Kroah-Hartman explains in his Linux Driver Project Status Report as of April 2008, “The Linux Driver Project (LDP) is alive and well, with over 300 developers wanting to participate, many drivers already written and accepted into the Linux kernel tree, and many more being currently developed. The main problem is a lack of projects. It turns out that there really isn’t much hardware that Linux doesn’t already support. Almost all new hardware produced is coming with a Linux driver already written by the company, or by the community with help from the company.” Be that as it may, there are two classes of hardware where Linux users face perpetual hardware driver woes. These are “video input devices and wireless network cards, that is not well supported by Linux, but large efforts are already underway to resolve this issue, with the wireless driver issue pretty much taken care of already, however there are a few notable exceptions,” said Kroah-Hartman.
In general, though, Kroah-Hartman sees people’s perception of there not being enough Linux drivers as a myth. What perpetuates this myth are four things. The first two are the aforementioned video input and Wi-Fi devices. The other two are printer and scanners, especially all-in-one units that combine multiple functions into one box, and ” There are two main classes of hardware, video input devices and wireless network cards, that is not well supported by Linux, but large efforts are already underway to resolve this issue, with the wireless driver issue pretty much taken care of already, however there are a few notable exceptions.” In the case of printers and scanners, Kroah-Hartman said that these are already “being handled very well by the Linux Printing project and the SANE project.” In any case, he continued, “Printer and scanner drivers in Linux are userspace programs and libraries and have nothing to do with the kernel at all. If you have any issues with these types of devices, please go ask the developers of those projects about it. They are very knowledgeable, skilled, have vendor contacts, and can do a lot to help resolve your issues.” As for older equipment, well, there’s only so much you can do with hardware that has no documentation, no open APIs (application programming interfaces), and sometimes, no surviving manufacturer. As Kroah-Hartman said, “It would be great for Linux to support all of these older devices, but without the specs for the device, or in many cases, a company that is still in business, Linux support is going to be very difficult to achieve.” But, what about the real problem children, Wi-Fi and video-input devices? According to Kroah-Hartman, “The Linux-Wireless group of developers have done an amazing amount of work in the past year, adding a whole new wireless protocol stack to the Linux kernel, as well as numerous different hardware drivers, some initially created by vendors and others created by reverse engineering the hardware with no vendor help or approval.” Still, Kroah-Hartman admits, “There are still some wireless vendors that do not provide Linux support directly. Two of these, Atheros and Broadcom have drivers created by the community through reverse engineering efforts. These drivers usually lag the introduction of the hardware by a number of months due to the lack of vendor support.” Unfortunately for Linux users, Broadcom and Atheros are ranked by ABI Research as the number one and number two Wi-Fi chipset vendors. So, while Linux does have better Wi-Fi support, it doesn’t have it for the equipment where it needs it the most. As for video-input devices, such as Web-cams, well there things aren’t looking so rosy. Kroah-Hartman said that while “there is an active Linux developer community” it’s “hampered by a different development model (Mercurial trees outside of the main kernel source), and a lack of full-time developers, not to mention a high degree of inter-personal conflicts.” Still, he continued, “support for a large majority of these devices is slowly trickling into the main kernel tree, the most important being the USB Video class driver, which will support almost all new USB video devices in the future, thereby removing the major problem most users will face when purchasing a new video device.” So, all that said, Kroah-Hartman announced that the LDP is changing its focus. Now, it will work with vendors to help them understand how to work with Linux. In addition, he’s trying a new approach to creating new Linux drivers for vendors that do want the LDP’s help. In addition, according to Brandon Phillips, a Linux kernel developer who works for Novell and with the LDP, “LDP developers will be working on cleaning up existing drivers that are ‘out of tree’ from the main Linux kernel.” Out of tree device drivers are ones that work with Linux, but have never been sufficiently cleaned up to actually be made an official part of Linux. According to Phillips, this will not only add more devices that are automatically supported by any Linux distribution, it will also give new device driver developers some useful experience. Needless to say, of course, Phillips also said that, “The LDP would love to work on new drivers. If a vendor has a problem with revealing information about their device, they can work with the Linux Foundation as a trusted third party under NDAs (non-disclosure agreements). Original link: http://practical-tech.com/operat... |
Richard Matthew Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, has probably been called many names and been compared to a great many characters in his lifetime.
I doubt, however, whether he has been even likened to a capricious fashion model. That's exactly what Theo de Raadt, the founder of the OpenBSD project, has done. And the model in question is the British supermodel Naomi Campbell. With every release of OpenBSD, the project also releases a song, "to describe some event or controversy the project went through, or a stance that was taken, over the previous six months." The latest song, titled Home to Hypocrisy, which is to accompany version 4.3 of OpenBSD due to be released on May 1, is squarely aimed at Stallman for whom de Raadt obviously has a deep dislike. The comparison to Campbell, de Raadt explains in a commentary that accompanies the song, is because Stallman was once allegedly ejected from a plane in 1998 for demanding that passengers be permitted to deplane when the flight was waiting in the queue for take-off. The flight was leaving Washington for New Orleans. Apparently a few OpenBSD developers were on the same flight and bound for an Usenix conference. Hence, says de Raadt, "we have an accurate story of the events." Ms Campbell was once apparently forcibly removed from a British Airways flight bound for Los Angeles for kicking up a fuss about a mislaid suitcase. Original link: http://www.itwire.com/content/vi... Yesterday, I fired up the search engines and noted a lot of stories in the media about Windows users freaking out about the planned June 30 end-of-life for Windows XP. They popped up in my net because quite a few of the stories had a passing comparison of the Windows users to the Linux and Mac communities.
From a Linux advocacy standpoint, it's a strong sense of Schadenfreude that prevails as I watch a usually nascent Windows community struggle to awaken itself fast enough to try to get something they want from Redmond. Good luck with that, guys. Quite a few commentators have made great hay how this is the best time for desktop Linux, as disenfranchised XP users refuse to migrate to Vista and are looking for a new home. That's certainly an appealing notion, and I won't argue against it. I would also expect Apple to ramp up their marketing campaign soon to try to catch some XP refugees, too. I had a chance yesterday to chat with Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Canonical, Ltd. It was one of those interviews that covered a broad range of topics, which I'll write up in a few days. But one part of the conversation that had a more immediate impact was Shuttleworth's impression of the XP exodus. I asked Shuttleworth if Canonical has any plans to capitalize on the June EOL for XP, particularly since Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is set to be released sometime this month. To me, it seems a perfect opportunity to strike while the iron is hot. Shuttleworth, however, prefers to focus his company's energies on the strengths of Linux in general and Ubuntu in particular. "I don't want to articulate our strategy in taking advantages of the weaknesses of Windows versus the highlighting the strengths of Linux," he told me. This gets into the negative identity treatise my colleague Bruce Byfield wrote up earlier this month. Byfield and I don't always agree, since I think a more aggressive approach is sometimes needed in pushing back against bullies. Bullying is a practice I abhor, and I tend to lead a little bit with my aggressive side when confronted with it. But I think Byfield, and now Shuttleworth, make some good points, too. A little less focusing on others and a little more focusing on us certainly seems to have merit. After all, look how far we've gotten already. Original link: http://blog.linuxtoday.com/blog/... April 15th, 2008 by lucas
It has now been more than 4 months since the last Debian developer account was created. 18 contributors have been through all steps, and are simply waiting for this simple administrative task to be done. We are sending a terrible message to potential contributors. We have strong requirements on the technical level of our developers. During the new maintainer process, we ask them to answer about 80 questions about Debian. We ask them to do grunt work. We review their reports twice (New Maintainers’ Front Desk, then Debian Account Manager). But even after we are totally satisfied about what they did, even after they became more qualified than many of our current DDs, we ask them to wait for months, so that the only person allowed to create accounts can finally do his “job”. It discourages the contributors currently in the NM process. I’ve seen several signs of frustration, or even depression. Some of them reduce their involvement in Debian, so we lose them before they even became Debian developers. Some of them consider resigning from the NM process. We should all feel guilty about that. But it also discourages people from joining Debian. Instead, they go to other more welcoming projects, which is totally understandable. Debian isn’t the only distribution with developers from the community those days. There’s Gentoo, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE. Some of those have nice programs for new contributors, like “school” sessions. Sure, Debian is the “biggest” distribution without a company behind it. But is independance worth all the trouble? Of course, we have Debian Maintainers. DM is great for people who want to work on their packages. But, when we are trying to release lenny, we need more: people who are going to go through RC bugs, submitting patches. Who are going to do QA work. In short: people who care more about the whole distribution. Can we afford not recruiting anybody? Can we run Debian with the current manpower? I don’t think so. There are more than 550 RC bugs in lenny, many packages are currently blocked from migrating to lenny because they are RC-buggy, and many packages are orphaned or neglected. There are also a lot of bugs which haven’t been filed yet (I asked for help with running piuparts, which would probably result in 100-200 new RC bugs, but nobody had time to help). Most of the work that needs to be done is not rocket science. We could use a lot more manpower. Currently, the same small set of developers is doing most of the grunt work. They will get tired too. So, what can we do, as simple developers? There’s no magic solution, but we can try a few things. 1. It seems that some people disagree that there’s a problem. Let’s prove them wrong: we could start a blog meme with “I, too, agree that the Debian accounts and keyring situation is severely hurting Debian, and that a solution needs to be found RSN.” It’s not going to solve the problem by itself, but it will at least show that we consider it very important. Pressure could help. 2. We could start discussing solutions together. Our newly elected DPL said that he would talk with the problematic teams to determine how the situation could be improved. Unfortunately, this has been tried in the past (and failed). It might work this time, of course, but we could prepare a backup plan. So let’s find one or two good plans, and vote on them. (I liked the idea of giving accounts creation/management to DSA. After all, it’s only an sysadmin task once the report has been approved by FD and DAM.) 3. We could push forward Josip Rodin’s proposal about infrastructure teams. It might not solve the DAM problem immediately, but would probably help avoid similar problems in the future. Notes: 1. Maybe the 18 waiting accounts will be created today or tomorrow. Even if that happens, it won’t solve anything. Waiting 4 months for a simple administrative task is not acceptable, and we need to fix that problem anyway. 2. Account creation is not the only problem. Some people have been unable to upload packages or to vote for the DPL election, because their PGP key expired, and nobody updated it even if they have been asking for more than 4 months. Original link: http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/bl... A Cannock company has labelled open source software 'the future' after turning its back on the big brands.
Mercian Labels, based in Watling Street supplies products including barcode, security and hologram labels to a wide variety of SMEs across the UK. The company claims to be the market leader in its field, employing 20 staff with a turnover of more than £1 million a year. When managing director Dr Adrian Steele joined in 2001 he made overhauling Mercian's computer systems a major priority. He said: "When I joined, the software and hardware was outdated - we were running just a couple of desktop machines using Windows 2000. "We developed our own code on the Microsoft Access platform, but it was no longer meeting our demands and the time had come to migrate to new Microsoft software, or look for something else. "The urgency of this was bought to life when our systems went down for four-and-a-half days in November 2006 which resulted in the loss of £10,000 profit." The company processes hundreds of invoices each week meaning the efficiency of its systems is vital. Dr Steele investigated the options and the technological robustness of Open Source software made him consider this option. Open Source software refers to the process by which programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software allowing it to evolve. "Having an academic background, the philosophy behind the software appealed to me," Dr Steele said. "Damage from viruses, uncontrollable system changes, security threats and difficult and expensive upgrade paths in existing systems made the decision comparatively easy. "The idea of being free of vendor lock-in and significantly lower licensing costs also appealed." Richard Jones took over as the new IT manager in 2006, with a university background in software engineering. "It was evident that the current systems in place had a lot of potential problems that would soon manifest themselves with serious detriment to the company," Richard said. "The concept of open source had always been of interest, and the idea of migrating to these solutions seemed most beneficial." Mercian now use the Ubuntu Linux Operating System and other open source software, including Zimbra email and calendaring. The firm has found no compatibility problems with the standard word processing and spreadsheet packages employees now use. Dr Steele said: "We believe the new infrastructure will give us significantly enhanced reliability, control and lower costs in the medium to long term. "There are some packages we can't migrate - the Sage accountancy software is one and you tamper with that at your peril! "However, we have found that although you can't migrate everything, you can migrate most people and applications with no major issues." Dr Steele thought it was important to share his experiences with other companies on a dedicated blog - www.selfadhesivelabels.com/blog. Martin King-Turner of the National B2B Centre - the e-business centre of excellence for the West Midlands - said he was pleased to see the company discovering the many benefits of the alternative to conventional software. "Mercian Labels has made a bold decision to embrace open source software and are set to gain from increased efficiency and reduced costs. "One of the many advantages is the fact developments are driven by what consumers want not by the commercial targets of the software manufacturers' marketing department." The National B2B Centre is part of WMG at the University of Warwick and funded by the European Regional Development Fund and AWM. Original link: http://www.birminghampost.net/bi... Nokia will introduce Qt to the maemo platform in addition to GTK+. The plan is in the earliest stage and recruitment offers for Qt/C++ developers will pop up soon. Don't expect any Qt application developed by Nokia for the tablets anytime soon, though. The first actual step will be the distribution of the Qt libraries for application development in maemo.org during 4Q2008. Nokia wants to explore cross-platform possibilities between S60 and maemo. It is interesting also to check the interest in the developer community for Qt in the tablets. GTK+ and Qt coexist in the Linux desktop and the mix could work in maemo as well. This is also a way to attract more attention from the KDE community, a sensible move especially if the Trolltech acquisition gets completed. GTK+ based Hildon continues defining the UI of maemo and the Internet Tablets. The maemo team is developing Hildon further and after the release of the N810 WiMAX edition there is more in the pipeline. Nokia has no plans to offer a "hildonized" Qt-based UI. Qt applications will look different in the tablets just like some successful 3rd party applications look different. Cross-platform development has its own challenges: the earlier we start the better. Original link: http://maemo.org/news/announceme... Argentina may become the first country in the world to require all government offices to use open-source software, pending the outcome of a bill recently introduced in the nation's congress.
The measure is sponsored by representative Marcelo Dragán as part of a national campaign against rampant software piracy in the South American country. More than 60 percent of the computer programs in Argentina are illegal, costing the software industry about $200 million a year, according to the vendor trade association Software Legal. Until the country's intellectual property law was modified in November 1998, it was perfectly legal to copy software in Argentina. Today, anyone caught with pirated goods faces fines and up to six years in the slammer. windows_open_source.jpeg After a 45-day "truce" in the wake of the law's passage, the association targeted 15,000 firms it believed use crooked copies, based on an analysis of public data, such as tax and social security documents. Of the original targets, about 6,000 have rectified their situation, said association president Martín Carranza Torres. Ironically, the government itself is one of the worst copyright violators. The association has pending lawsuits against several bureaucratic agencies, including the Secretariat of Tourism, the Federal Radio Committee and the Social Security Administration. "It's a cultural issue, not a money issue," Carranza Torres insisted. "People just don't understand the value of software." Not surprisingly, Carranza Torres is unhappy about the proposed bill. "We are against any law that impedes free competition," he said. "There should be a transparent bidding process, where every program is analyzed objectively." But switching to open-source software would mean big savings for the government, which is already crippled by a $145 billion debt, said Mario Albornoz, the director of the Institute of Social Studies of Science and Technology. The measure would create jobs for local programmers and software development companies, but might also cause a lot of headaches for functionaries ill-prepared to install and maintain open systems, he added. "The advantages and risks must be weighed openly in a dialogue that the government has yet to initiate," Albornoz said. Original link: http://argentinadiscovery.nirebl... |
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