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FOSS is Now Costing Software Vendors $60 Billion a Year in Annual Revenues, and It's Still Only 6% of the Global Spend.
Well, it looks like Richard Stallman, the father of FOSS, is going to have to cut his hair and get a suit because the warmed-over hippie movement he’s been leading is no longer the radical anti-software establishment counter-culture his rag-tag army fancies it is. Nope, it IS the software establishment. That is the finding of the Standish Group, which after five years of research on open source has delivered a $1,000 report called “Trends in Open Source,” a study that finds that FOSS is now costing software vendors $60 billion a year in annual revenues, and it’s still only 6% of the global spend. Standish also says that if open source product and service were calculated at commercial prices, the open source initiative would be the largest software company in the world, outselling Microsoft, Oracle and Computer Associates combined. And if all its annual hours were added up and divided by the average workweek, the open source community would equate to the largest software employer in the world. Standish says the open source phenomenon has reached the “fashion” stage, meaning the market has reached maturity and general acceptance, After that comes commoditization. Original link: http://java.sys-con.com/read/546... In recent announcements both Red Hat and Novell made it pretty clear that their foray onto the desktop would be delayed quite a bit longer. What they do not know is that they just left the door wide open for Ubuntu to conquer the desktop and the server space.
Well, we know now where both Red Hat and Novell stand as far as desktop Linux is concerned. Novell feels that it will be five more years before the desktop is a viable space for Linux. And Red Hat just doesn't seem to find any relevance in the desktop at this time. Now it's not that these two technology companies can't make decisions that they feel are in keeping with their mission or core business objectives; it's the cold hard fact that their absence from any active desktop initiative will spell problems down the road. Like him or not, Mark Shuttleworth is one shrewd businessman. Of course, you do not sell your company for $500 million and not have at least a modicum of business savvy. Over the last few years Shuttleworth has been incrementally putting the pieces of a global infrastructure/empire in place. The developers, the support services, and the whole Ubuntu ecosystem. With every release Shuttleworth eliminates barrier after barrier to Linux on the desktop. The excuses of “no driver support” or “hard-to-configure X server” are things of the past. Even restricted drivers are a click away. While Novell and Red Hat seem content, at the moment, to remain in the enterprise space, Canonical is “attacking” both desktop and server niches and this could spell trouble—big trouble—for Red Hat and Novell down the road. Here's why. The time is ripe for a Linux distribution to come to the fore and champion Linux on the desktop. I think we all can agree that, like it or not, Ubuntu has assumed this role. Now, as Ubuntu gets to be more popular on the desktop, a standard will emerge using Ubuntu as a metric. We already see other vendors such as Dell offering Ubuntu on the desktop. Add to this a server push that is scheduled to begin next month and you have a potential one-two combination that is hard to beat. By becoming a de facto standard on the desktop, Ubuntu can assert its role as a server OS much more easily. After all, it only makes sense that you use a desktop/server combo from the same company for best performance, right? And with Canonical recently announcing that major vendors such as HP, Dell, Sun, and IBM certifying their hardware to run Ubuntu server, it's easy to see how Canonical could easily offer end-to-end solutions with the developer and support infrastructure to back it up. By remaining on the sidelines where the desktop is concerned, Red Hat and Novell may have just passed up an opportunity of a lifetime. And by the time they realize what they've done, it may be too late. Ubuntu will have become entrenched as an end-to-end solution in every sector of industry. It should be interesting as the whole scenario plays out, but if I were a betting man, I would be looking hard at Canonical and putting my chips on their end of the table. Original link: http://lxer.com/module/newswire/... |
'Weird and hard to understand'
Tim Bray, the co-creator of XML turned Ruby on Rails enthusiast, has told developers to face up to lingering performance problems in the scripting stack. In a keynote at the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference last week, Bray called Rails "a big deal, a hot deal". And the Sun Microsystems director of web technologies is walking it likes he talks it: he's using Ruby on Rails for all his development. But... "Let's face the facts: Ruby is too slow," Bray told delegates. He says Ruby 1.8.6 - which dominates the enterprise landscape - is up to 20 times slower than Java. And, despite tests, the cause of the problem remains unclear - is it compilation of Ruby or "some pretty freaking complex and scary stuff" in Rails. "When you start to run Rails, you get wildly non-linear performance. Rails has worked well on Ruby 1.8.6... everything else is a work in progress. It's weird and it's hard to understand," Bray said. "Ruby is richly festooned with core libraries and APIs that aren't built in Ruby, they are built in C," he said. Fellow keynote speaker John Lam, a Microsoft project manager who's leading work porting Ruby to the .NET Framework with IronRuby, also noted "strange anomalies" in the way Ruby works. Various initiatives are underway to address the Ruby speed problem. These include the Smalltalk-inspired Rubinus that Sun is supporting; the somewhat obscure Maglev; and - of course - JRuby. This runs on the Java Virtual Machine and is up to five times faster than Ruby, according to Bray. In spite of the go slow, Bray delivered a robust endorsement of Ruby on Rails. For him, the Rails framework drives Ruby's success and gives Ruby an edge over PHP and Sun's beloved Java in speed of development, scalability and maintainability. "The majority of Ruby in the world is driven by Rails," he said. Rails offers a clean, prescribed and predictable framework while Java offers too many choices. PHP is widespread and is used in massive applications such as Facebook and Wikipedia, but the accompanying PHP frameworks such as CakePHP, have not followed in terms of deployment, breeding "spaghetti code" that's difficult to fix and extend. According to Bray, the prescriptive nature of the PHP framework suits most web front-ended applications' database batch needs when it comes to create, repeat, update and delete. The downside? If you need your database calls to do something a little different, you're on your own. Rails also encourages best practices, through the use of test-driven development to improve construction and model view control to help maintain applications. Speed of development is the number-one reason that CTOs at big banks and airlines are calling Bray in to advise on Ruby. "They've heard it gives them applications in months rather than years. That's why Ruby came out of nowhere," he said. "You can get something done faster in Ruby once you've got it built, you can do updates and maintenance faster than you can in PHP." Other languages could learn a thing or two from Rails and Bray predicts frameworks would become more "Rails-like" - meaning the future does not belong to Ruby on Rails alone. Original link: http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/20... In what is being perceived as a move to counter the threat of Linux — a free operating system — in the ultra-low-cost personal computer (ULCPC) segment, Microsoft has extended the sale of Windows XP Home by two years to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) beyond the current deadline of June 30.
Ultra-low-cost PCs have been drawing interest from governments and schools in emerging markets like India and Asia. For instance, the low-cost Asus Eee PC alone is estimated to sell around 120,000 units in India this year. Ultra-low-cost PCs have been drawing interest from governments and schools in emerging markets like India and Asia. For instance, the low-cost Asus Eee PC alone is estimated to sell around 120,000 units in India this year. Linux is the operating system (OS) running the current poster child for low-cost laptops like Asustek Computer’s Eee PC, released in January and costs just Rs 18,000. To counter this, Microsoft maintains that it wants to see Windows on ULCPCs, and wants “to provide the best possible Windows experience for the devices”. Prasanna Meduri, director (Windows client business group), Microsoft India, says: “The feedback we’ve got from customers and partners is that they want Windows on low-cost devices.” However, “the Vista operating system requires more horsepower than these machines have, but Windows XP Home could be a fit,” says an analyst. This explains the extension of XP. For instance, Asus sells four versions of its Eee PC with a Linux-based operating system, but lists in the computer’s spec sheet that they all are Windows XP-compatible. The results are showing. Says Francis Kao, product head (Notebook and Eee PC), Asus: “Microsoft approached us in the initial development phase of Eee PC. We had over 1,000 engineers working on the Eee PC. This May, we will release the Windows XP Home models with different storage capacities.” The prices, however, are undecided but Kao admits “they could be higher than the Linux PCs as XP models will have more features”. Linux was also supposed to be the OS for a forthcoming line of ULCPCs based on new Intel Atom processors, called Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs). However, since the MIDs are only expected at the year-end, this too could have been a reason for Microsoft to extend XP’s availability, say experts. But what does XP’s extension mean for Vista? Microsoft maintains there are no plans to change Vista to make it more suitable for ULCPCs. Original link: http://www.business-standard.com... Sometimes, there isn't much you can do to kick-start your career. Not everyone can be lucky enough to get involved in a high-profile project at work, or to develop a talent in a technology that's suddenly in-demand. But it surprises me when IT professionals who aim to move up the career ladders don't take advantage of one resource that's a win-win solution all around: get involved in an open source project.
This is particularly important to women in IT, who can feel that it's hard to get noticed in their companies (see The Executive Woman's Guide to Self-Promotion for general guidelines on how to counter that problem). But it really applies to anyone who wants to gain experience and visibility in the IT department, even if you don't care about becoming a rock star. As a participant in an open source project, everything is in your control. You pick the project that you think is the most valuable, or in which you can develop the skills you need but can't justify on your résumé. In the universe of open source, you're judged only by what you contribute. Corporate politics aren't an issue. If your code is useful, or your technical documentation is appreciated, or you're just a welcoming voice on the community IRC channel, you have a good chance of being invited to become a committer. This doesn't necessarily mean leaving your current company; it can generate new opportunities where you currently work. (See The Enterprise Committer: When Your Employee Develops Open-Source Code on the Company Payroll.) Even if you're a volunteer on the open source project (which is probable), you can put as much time into the project as is reasonable for your lifestyle and your interest level. "Becoming known in open source is trivial. Just show up, check the issue queue and start fixing bugs," one developer told me. That can spell career opportunities for IT professionals who suffer from a lack of company training. One analyst mentioned just-in-passing last week at the Gartner conference that the average enterprise spends only about $500 per year on training and conferences per developer. Want to learn a new language, add a new platform to your arsenal, take on a new kind of responsibility? Your company probably won't foot the bill, so it's up to you to develop new skills. Dive right in. Yet—to circle back to the relevance to IT women—relatively few women make a point of getting involved, and darnit I wish they'd recognize this opportunity. According to Evans Data's 2008 Developer Relations Programs Survey, women are less likely to develop open source software than were men; just 22 percent of women (versus 32 percent of men) wrote any open source software. Yet open source is as even a playing ground as one could ask for, since every project's membership is self-selected. I'm not saying that every developer should drop everything and devote herself to an open source project. We all have to think about paying the bills, not to mention finding work/life balance. But instead of dashing off a brief bug report for an open source tool you use, write a fully detailed one with "here's the problem I ran into; here's what I think might be causing it; here's how you might fix it." Submit a patch. Communicate in the IRC or the discussion group. Doing so builds reputation and might lead to you being hired. I'm also not trying to imply that you should pick a project at random. Original link: http://advice.cio.com/esther_sch... Creative has received a lot of comments and rants (a lot of them well earned) from the Linux community for not supporting their X-FI cards on the GNU/Linux platform. Earlier, in august 2007, they did a release of a Beta driver, that seemed to leave a lot to wish for, even being a Beta driver. It was only released for 64 bit systems, and didn't work for a lot of users. You want proof? Just check the forums at Creative.
Now they've released a new Beta driver, even using the same version number. This was released for both 32 and 64 bit Linux, which at least caters to 50% of all the forum posts in their (very) lively forum. The announcement can be found at: http://forums.creative.com/... Let's hope this one is a bit better. This might not be so much of an issue though, since the Open Source community has already been handed the specifications of the hardware, in this case the developers at ALSA and OSS. http://4front-tech.com/... http://mailman.alsa-project.org/... Original link: http://peterazp.blogspot.com/200... |
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