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As I'm occasionally reminded, MySQL didn't start out as open source. In fact, MySQL's original license was very similar to what it is trying to achieve today: Free for noncommercial use, but not-so-free for commercial use. It didn't decide to go open source (GPL) until 1999. So for those of us that get caught up in MySQL's decision to keep some extensions closed to paid subscribers, perhaps a refresher course in MySQL history will make it seem a bit less shocking. (Also be sure to check out the early 2001 brouhaha over trademark violations surrounding MySQL.org. Fascinating stuff.) With that said, there's an ongoing tension between commercialization and adoption that MySQL (and all commercial open-source projects) have to manage. As a friend noted in an email to me yesterday: Remember that Monty [co-founder of MySQL] chose to go open source only after the world totally ignored his work. There is a real value that goes along with being open source that lends itself well to adoption. If you have to pay, then that will deter adoption of immature products in ways that it won't with free products. His take on Monty's reasoning is a bit strong, and I don't agree that MySQL had been ignored, but still he has a point: Open sourcing one's code can lead to far greater adoption in a short period of time than proprietary source. The question, however, remains for all open-source projects: Is it fair or productive to close off the code after open source has made it popular? It's not as if the grass is brilliantly green on the commercialization side of the fence, either, as my friend goes on to point out: This is the crux of the MySQL/Sun commercialization problem: They can't make the enterprise version diverge or they lose the adoption benefit, and enterprise sales are still long, high ceremony and costly. Perhaps a little empathy, rather than blame, is therefore in order for the MySQL management team as they try to figure out how to trade in some of MySQL's popularity for a bit more cash. It's a fair desire but it's by no means obvious that closing off some extensions will accomplish this. The MySQL team is experimenting, as they've said. Let's cut them a little slack (while still remaining open-mouthed and open-minded). Commercializing open source is a tricky balancing act, as open-source Funambol's name suggests (It means "tightrope walker"). For MySQL, it's a "tightrope" it has been walking for more than 10 years, which decade has seen the company on both sides of the open source/proprietary divide. Ultimately, the only thing we know is that Marten, Monty, Zack, and team mean well and generally do well. They seem to balance better than most. Original link: http://www.cnet.com/8301-13505_1... While it's true that open-source companies, in general, are starting from a small base of revenue and adoption, it's equally true that the real measure of any company is growth. If it's good, it will grow. Hence, it's great to see MindTouch, a commercial open-source collaboration company, booming: * Over 200,000 active installs - 100 percent increase * Installs on all major Linux distributions - 600 percent increase * More than 3,000 registered members at the developer community - 30 percent increase * Translated into 16 languages - 500 percent increase Impressive, but perhaps doubly so when you consider the nature of its customer base: Federal Express, Microsoft (I guess Sharepoint wasn't good enough for them ;-), United States Environmental Protection Agency (saving paper by collaborating online), and the City of Los Angeles, to name but a few. As an advisor to MindTouch, I've been impressed by the quality of the product and the community uptake of a commercial open-source project. That's no small feat. It tends to be much easier to get community input as a community project - the more successful the company, the less involved the community. We'll see if MindTouch can break that cycle. Original link: http://www.cnet.com/8301-13505_1... The Platform as a Service Model
James Turner Monday, April 21, 2008 11:02:25 AM One of the more interesting technologies I've been exposed to in the past year is the Force.com platform. Salesforce.com, well known for their Software as a Service CRM product, has taken the expertise they've garnered delivering a high-capacity application to a global market, and used it to offer the underlying infrastructure to application developers. If you imagine the "Platform as a Service" (PaaS) landscape as a spectrum, you have offerings like Amazon's EC2 at one end. EC2 is essentially a VM-based technology with some scalability infrastructure, but you have to roll everything else yourself, from persistence to failover. In the middle, you have products like Google's App Engine, which allow you to deploy an application with many of the underlying nuts-and-bolts concerns handled by Google, but is still essentially a deployment environment that you hand-code Python with. Force.com is another creature entirely. The Force.com environment builds onto of the existing Salesforce.com platform, including all the base objects from the CRM application. To this you can add you own custom objects (for object, think "table"). By and large, Force.com objects look and feel like a SQL table, including foreign key relationships. Using custom objects, you can create a schema that represents your application's persistence data in the same way you would traditionally with SQL. Once you've got your schema set up (either using a web-based UI which is slow, or an Eclipse plug-in which requires you to edit the schema in raw XML), you're ready to pretty up the CRUD screens using the Web UI, and then to add the code that will handle the business logic. You write your server-side code in Apex, which is essentially Java with some semantic sugar to allow you to embed SQL-style queries into the code. You can hook Apex code up as triggers on database events, or attach them to web pages using VisualForce (a stripped down version of Java Server Faces.) You can also call Apex code externally, because you can trivially turn any Apex class into a collection of web server calls, with an automatically generated WSDL. You can also consume external web services by consuming a WSDL, which generates an Apex class (much the same as you'd get from WSDL2JAVA in Java.) In addition to the stock CRUD screens Force.com produces for each object, you also get built-in (if somewhat restricted) reporting capabilities. You can also go wild and produce any web UI you want by coding in VisualForce. Force.com is a totally hosted solution running on the same servers on which Salesforce.com runs. As a result, Salesforce has guaranteed service level agreements and performance targets. You can see the current status of the system at any time by going to trust.salesforce.com. Sounds great, doesn't it? So what's the catch? Well, the biggest one is the 'governors'. These are restrictions placed on the code to make sure an individual application doesn't drag the shared servers to their knees. For example, you can't do more that 10 different database operations (updates, deletes, inserts, etc) in a single code invocation. This causes you to rethink a lot of traditional "lazy" database coding techniques. Rather than write: for (Foo f: foos) { f.age += 1; update f; } You'd write: for (Foo f: foos) { f.age += 1; } update foos; This is because the first method would fail if "foos" had more than 10 elements, whereas the second only does a single database operation regardless of the length of "foos". You'd hit other limits though, there's a limit on the maximum number of rows you can operate on in a single database action as well. Do these limits cause problems? Sure, they do. A lot of energy can be spent making your code as efficient as possible from a database perspective. You may also have to conclude that your application just isn't appropriate for deployment on Force.com. There are workarounds, such as calling one piece of Force.com from another as a web service call, which buys you a fresh set of governor limits, but you always have to have the limits in the back of your mind as you develop. The other weakness of Force.com is the IDE. Right now, the Eclipse plug-in is primitive but rapidly improvement. There's still a lot of things you can't get into source control, such as screen layouts and internationalization. You also can't single-step or debug the code from the IDE, you're back in the days of printing statements and debug logs. So, Force.com is essentially a decision to trade worrying about the governors and dealing with a primitive IDE, and in return get most of the infrastructure such as persistence, scalability and failover for free. In my experience, Force.com can dramatically increase development velocity, If you choose wisely which projects to apply it to. You end up mainly spending you cycles thinking about the business logic and integration with other systems, rather than the "glue" holding your application together. If you go in with your eyes open, understanding that you're locking yourself into a platform that you will not be able to easily extract yourself from, Force.com can get you up and running quickly. And because you can get a free three-user Force.com development account for the asking by going to developer.force.com, you don't need to invest a lot of time or effort getting your development environment set up, either. Platform as a Service may not be for everyone, but with Amazon, Google and Salesforce all offering variations on the concept, it's worth your while to at least check it out and see if it might be a good fit for your next application. Original link: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linux... In response to my last entry on bug reports in Debian, and the distro's propensity to offer workarounds in the messages that follow bug reports without coming right out and saying whether or not the bug is going to be "fixed" (if it's not a bug, it must be a "feature," no?), a discussion started on LXer about whether you should run Stable (currently Etch) or Testing (Lenny).
My point of view is basically that if Etch works for you, it's stable all right. But if things aren't working quite right for your hardware in Debian's Stable release, you might want to start looking elsewhere. Stable isn't going to start sprouting features out of its nether regions just because it doesn't work for you. Only in Lenny -- with its newer GNOME tools -- did Debian work well on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450). And Lenny runs better on all my other boxes, too. I haven't had to turn back to Etch on any of my computers to get the best functionality I can out of Debian. With Ubuntu, not so much. On my main test box, 8.04 is running, but not as well as 6.06 and 7.04. If both Etch and Lenny didn't do so well on this VIA C3 Samuel-based box, I'd probably be running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS for the next year and so of its life before Canonical ends support for it. Besides running well once installed, for me Debian's installer has never failed me. With one disc, I can install a barebones system, an Xfce, KDE or GNOME desktop, a server, or anything in between with the use of apt/Aptitude/Synaptic. I read in the now-out-of-date "The Debian System" about some Debian-produces spins of the distro aimed at office use, as well as other segments of the user base, such audio fanatics, kids and others. I'll have to look back again for specifics, but to get to my point, I see no such distros from Debian today -- and I've said all along that Debian could -- and should -- produce an official live CD that has a package mix much like Ubuntu's and installs in pretty much the same way. But it would be Debian, not Ubuntu, and that would mean more speed, greater stability ... and just more Debiany. If "Debiany" is not a word, I'd like to create it right now. I'm not saying I won't continue to run other distros. I'd like to try Slackware with Dropline GNOME (I like GNOME -- sue me, fanboys), but right here, right now, Debian is what does it for me. Original link: http://www.insidesocal.com/click... |
I was reading Brett Legree's 6 Weeks site and followed a link to Q10 because it sounded interesting.
Imagine my surprise when the first text to hit my eyes was this: Q10 runs under Windows. No version for Linux or Mac is planned. Ehh? Folks don't usually go out of their way to tell you what their product WON'T run on, do they? I suspect some hard feelings here, maybe somone who has been mishandled by a few Linux or Mac Fanboys? Or maybe (and wouldn't this be ironic) the developers are tired of hearing requests for Linux and Mac versions? Well, whatever: this product is for Windows only and they want to be darn sure we Unixy cretins know that. So don't bug us about it, okay, because NO OTHER VERSION IS PLANNED. Yeah, yeah, Linux and Mac market share are growing by leaps and bounds, but NO VERSION IS PLANNED. Got it? Yes, we know Vista sucks, even Microsoft execs know that, but you just aren't listening: NO LINUX OR MAC VERSION IS PLANNED. Well, sure, yes, it is a free product so we really would have nothing to lose and everything to gain by suggesting that someone else might want to use that source and hack out a better.. I mean "diffferent" version, but sheesh, we can't do that because NO VERSION IS PLANNED. And yes, we could do it ourselves, we know it isn't that hard, but we aren't going to dirty ourselves like that. Windows is Pure, and Mac and Linux are all yucky and demeaning and that's why NO VERSION IS PLANNED. So: download our Windows version and run it under emulation if that's what you need to do because (and I'm only going to say this one more time) NO LINUX OR MAC VERSION IS PLANNED. OK? Are we all on the same page now? Windows version, yes, Linux or Mac version, no. It's really very simple.. Why are you all starting up your email? No, you are not going to send email requesting a Linux or Mac version, are you? It's not going to do any good - I already told you, NO VERSION IS PLANNED. Original link: http://aplawrence.com/Linux/no-p... I spent part of yesterday attending the Open Source Summit at Portland’s Innotech Business and Technology Conference, and moderating a panel on ‘IT Giants and Open Source.’ We had a great discussion about the reasons, roles, responsibilities and rewards for big vendors to be acutely and adequately participating in open source software development and commercialization. Our fabulous panelists were Danese Cooper, open source diva, knitting machine and present to give perspective from Intel, Stuart Cohen of OSDL fame and current leader of startup CSI and Gerrit Huizenga, an IBM Solutions Architect working with Linux in the cloud, who when asked how to pronounce his last name correctly, politely told me, ‘Very carefully’ (Hi-zen-ga).
There was general agreement that large IT vendors, including software giants such as Google, Oracle and even Microsoft, all see a need for involvement in open source. What also emerged as a common theme during our panel was that no big vendor could afford not to be in open source in some way or another. Basically, it’s been competitive necessity and cost effectiveness that has led vendors to open source, and this helps explain why we see open source all over the place. There was also a recognition that we were not talking about what vendors might be doing or when they might be making moves around open source. We were talking about the things these vendors are doing today and where they are looking next to push the ideas and advantages of open source further. We also talked about the responsibility of vendors, and the basic theme here was that companies better know what they’re doing with open source. Rule number one seemed to be that participation is not optional. This is particularly so when a large vendor wants to try and leverage that open source code and development for commercial gain that, in most cases, is now stretching into the billions for the big players. Panalists contemplating the IT giants and open source also pointed to the enterprise credibility that large companies can give open source software by providing commercial support. It’s true that one of the biggest inhibitors to open source use by businesses is their wariness of using software without a company and commercial support behind it. The commercial support options for open source continue to grow with SIs, OS companies, application vendors and others all providing support for more open source software. However, CSI’s Cohen contends that there is so much new open source software being created, there are not enough commercial support providers to keep up. This could mean that commercial support for open source will continue to be a challenge, but it also highlights the opportunity in supporting open source. Another big topic was interoperability, which was my term and was pretty much broken down to mean standards in the view of our panelists. Unfortunately, there was strong agreement that today’s standards procedures and practices (ISO approval of OOXML perhaps still fresh in their minds) are not adequately promoting the kind of transparancy and collaboration needed. There was, however, somewhat of a bright spot in this discussion, and that was the recurring theme of customer demand for interoperability and truly open standards. The market is making vendors, from Red Hat to Microsoft, work harder to support and interoperate with each others’ technologies, both open source and proprietary, through truly open standards. We discussed open source mergers and acquisitions from the view of the large vendors, and while Cooper called valuations from deals such as Citrix-XenSource ($500m) and Sun-MySQL ($1bn) signs of a bubble, Cohen contended that the value of an open source software operation is actually the same as a traditional one: the customers and relationships. I would argue that the high open source pricetags in recent M&A highlight how significant of a competitive factor these open source projects and vendors can be, forcing larger players to do some bidding and make aggressive moves. Taking an audience question on how big software companies such as Microsoft and Oracle are viewing competition from open source, IBM’s Huizenga highlighted how all proprietary software companies are seeing more and more of their traditional revenue bases challenged by open source. This competition, highlighted in a recent study, comes with a growing audience of open source users, developers and yes, enterprises that do not pay anyone for any software, support or services, yet extend the reach of open source. Huizenga later highlighted the ongoing opportunity in open source software, referencing how IBM’s investements in Linux, far less than what would be invested in proprietary development, continue to pay off hansomely. Original link: http://blogs.the451group.com/ope... Word documents generated by today's version of Microsoft Office 2007 do not conform to the Office Open XML standard under development by the International Organization for Standardization, according to tests run by a document standards specialist.
In a blog posting last week, Alex Brown, leader of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) group in charge of maintaining the Office Open XML (OOXML) standard, revealed that Microsoft Office 2007 documents do not meet the latest specifications of the ISO OOXML draft standard. "Word documents generated by today's version of Microsoft Office 2007 do not conform to ISO/IEC 29500," Brown in the blog post recounting the process of testing a document against the "strict" and "transitional" schema defined in the standard. Microsoft Office 2007 saves files in OOXML, an XML-based format, which has been offered for standardization through the Ecma industry body to the ISO. Since a vote narrowly accepted OOXML as a draft international standard earlier this month, ISO is now in control of the specification. As changes were made at an ISO ballot resolution meeting, Office 2007 documents no longer conform to the current standard based on OOXML, known as ISO/IEC 29500, according to Brown. In a statement sent to ZDNet UK on Friday, Brown said that although he is hopeful that Microsoft will update its Office products to stay in line with the version of OOXML approved by ISO, it is not guaranteed. "The question behind the question, for a lot of the current OOXML debate, seems to be: can Microsoft really be trusted to behave? We shall see," Brown said. Commentators, including Tim Bray, the inventor of XML, have suggested that Microsoft is unlikely to bother to keep conformant with the OOXML standard as it develops within ISO, but Brown was more optimistic. "Given Microsoft's proven ability to tinker with the Office XML file format between service packs, I am hoping that Microsoft Office will shortly be brought into line with the (ISO/IEC) 29500 specification, and will stay that way," Brown said. "Indeed, a strong motivation for approving 29500 as an ISO/IEC standard was to discourage Microsoft from this kind of file-format rug-pulling stunt in future." Brown added that Microsoft has probably realized that there may be considerable commercial advantages to becoming a good citizen in the standards community. "Actively working to make OOXML an internationally informed standard will help them to retain their considerable share of the desktop office space, as this removes objections to Office having a proprietary, vendor-controlled format," he said. In future, Brown hopes to repeat the test to see if the open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, conforms with the Open Source Initiative (OSI) version of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) document standard: ISO/IEC 26300. He asked: "Will anyone be brave enough to predict what kind of result that exercise will have?" Peter Judge of ZDNet UK reported from London. Original link: http://www.news.com/Office-2007-... I recently came across a YouTube video created by Blogeee.net which shows both the Windows Eee PC and the Linux Eee PC (I assume each with the same specifications) starting up, launching Firefox, and shutting down. It is very apparent in the video that the Linux version is much faster, but, since only the startup is done at the same time for both machines, it is hard to tell just how much faster. I timed each part (starting up, launching Firefox, and shutting down) to see what the time difference really was. Here is what I found:
Startup Linux: 30 seconds - Windows: 54 seconds Launching Firefox Linux: 4 seconds - Windows: 16 seconds Shutdown Linux: 6 seconds - Windows: 68 seconds (Note: Numbers are approximate. Firefox start time is from clicking on the Firefox icon to the dialog about starting a new session and then from the end of that dialog to when the windows appears, or, in other words, everything but loading the web page and waiting for the user to click on new session or resume session.) Those numbers by themselves are impressive, but they get even more impressive when you look at how many times faster the Linux version really is. Startup: Windows takes 24 seconds longer. Linux is just less than twice as fast. Launching Firefox: Windows takes 12 seconds longer. Linux is four times faster. Shutdown: Windows takes 62 seconds longer. Linux is slightly more than 11 times faster. Look at it, Microsoft. Vista would barely even run on these things and Windows XP is much slower than Linux. This is very likely to be Linux’s first major success on the desktop. Original link: http://www.linuxloop.com/news/20... Compact OpenMicroServer already used by thousands of businesses in Asia and tested by Shimizu Corporation, a Top 5 Japanese Contractor, in high-technology disaster prevention systems
SAN JOSE, Calif.-April 21, 2008-Plat'Home, Japan's Linux technology pioneer, today announced its OpenMicroServerTM, a small, tough, easy-to-use, easy-to-configure solution for growing companies, is available to North American customers. Plat'Home's OpenMicroServer has been built and tested to provide high reliability for customers who do not have much extra room, and are likely to largely ignore the machine for weeks and months after initial installation. The MicroServer series, of which the OpenMicroServer is the most recent model, has been deployed widely in Japan and Asia since 2001. It is a core technology in the experimental disaster prevention system of Shimizu Corporation's Safety and Security Center. Shimizu Corporation has over US $14 billion in annual revenue and is widely recognized as one of the top 5 contractors in Japan. “Japan is situated on the Pacific ‘Rim of Fire,’ so it is important to take into consideration how technology handles earthquakes and other natural events. We needed a server that could handle extreme conditions but was not as expensive as specialized hardware,” said Hideo Kobayashi, lead researcher of the Shimizu Institute of Technology Incubation Center. “Plat'Home's OpenMicroServer allows us to build safer systems for our customers.” Key features of the Plat'Home OpenMicroServer include: * Compact design (9'' x 4'' x 1.3'') * Integrated Power over Ethernet (PoE) * Stable long-term operation up to 122°F when using PoE functionality (based on 625-day endurance test) * 400 MHz AMD Alchemy (MIPS) processor * 2x Gigabit Ethernet ports, 1x 100MBit Ethernet (PoE capable) port * 2 USB 2.0 ports and 2 serial ports (RJ45 connector) “The OpenMicroServer has what we like to think of as very ‘Japanese characteristics.’ It doesn't stand out, and it doesn't complain. It just gets the job done. This 4th generation product -- selling since 2001 -- fits small and large companies that need reliability,” said Tomoyasu Suzuki, president of Plat'Home. “Tuck it in the server room, set it up, and you can depend on it to keep doing its job. ” Plat'Home makes devices available for test evaluation by qualified prospective enterprise customers in the U.S. and Japan. For information on how to test your applications on a OpenMicroServer on your network, please contact Plat'Home at support@plathome.com. About Plat'Home Plat'Home Co., Ltd. introduced the fledgling Linux operating system to Japan when it was founded in 1993. Plat'Home introduced the first server line under its own brand in 1996, and went public at the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2000. Plat'Home is First Partner for SoftEther, developer of the revolutionary VPN software PacketiX VPN. In 2007, Plat'Home established its first U.S. subsidiary, in San Jose, California, to introduce Japanese IT products to new markets. For more information, please contact Plat'Home USA Ltd. at sales@plathome.com. Media Contact Jesse Casman Page One PR for Plat'Home jesse@pageonepr.com 415-321-2347 Original link: http://www.plathome.com/news/rel... Abas Business Solutions (PRC) Ltd. announced today that its Abas ERP system has been honorably awarded the "Winner of Enterprise Resources Planning Software" granted by Linux Pilot's Editorial at the award presentation ceremony at "Linux & OSS Best Solution 2008" held on 17th April. It's the third time that the Abas ERP system has been granted such an award, a position of pride for both Abas' employees and customers.
The "Linux & OSS Best Solution" event is held to encourage the use of Linux and OSS in empowering business and consumer solutions. The Abas ERP system was granted the award for offering an IT solution base on the Linux platform with long-term commercial benefits to customers and for devoting itself to improving the operational efficiency of manufacturers in Mainland China and Hong Kong. In recent years, experiencing the influence under multiple policies, the internal and external environment of Chinese manufacturing has been changing greatly. Mr. Vincent Lau, COO of Abas-PRC expressed, "Last year, manufacturers in eastern China faced the pressure of 'Four Shortages' and 'Four Increases'. 'Four Shortages' includes the shortage of manpower, land, water and electricity; 'Four Increases' includes the increase in raw materials' price, oil prices and salary, as well as Renminbi appreciation, which greatly increased manufacturers' operation costs. With the increasing difficulties in operational environments, "the survival of the fittest" phenomenon arises in the manufacturing industry. Under this situation, manufacturers who are intent on developing their brands have quickened steps to invest in an ERP system to strengthen management, enhance operation efficiency and decrease the bad effect brought by the "Four Shortages" and "Four Increase". The Abas ERP system can satisfy developing enterprises' development requirements and help manufacturers improve operation efficiency." From holistic system structure to each functional module's design, Abas technicians adhere to the idea of "Think Big, Start Small" to ensure that the system can really help enterprises optimize business flow. For example, senior managers can capture the business status of all levels through integrated system data and help to make right business decisions quickly; the system can also help enterprises realize efficient cost management, etc. Together with a 28-year experience in manufacturing enterprise services, we believe that Abas ERP can help manufacturing enterprises to plan efficient processes during production, purchase and sales, realizing operation management objectives and reaching high levels of return on investment. About Abas Abas Business Solutions (PRC) Ltd. is a recognized leader in delivering collaborative ERP solutions. It was founded in Hong Kong in 2003 and branches in Shenzhen and Shanghai were established afterward. It aims to provide comprehensive ERP software and IT services, from ERP consulting to software development and installation, to SMEs in Mainland China and Hong Kong. There are over 2000 Abas customers and more than 45000 users of Abas software worldwide. For details, please visit: http://www.abas-prc.com Original link: http://lxer.com/module/newswire/... |
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