Bradley Kuhn makes a better world through software freedom

Bradley Kuhn is one of the founding team members of the Software Freedom Law Center, and a longtime advocate for the cause of Free Software. Many consider him one of the most influential voices in the worldwide FLOSS community. Kuhn, formerly the executive director of the Free Software Foundation, took some time recently to catch us up on his latest work.

Gifts of Open Source

By Mario Apicella and Paul Venezia, CIO, 04/18/08

Combining 'Open Source' and 'storage' in the same sentence used to trigger a sardonic grin, but no longer. The availability of free and open software is as true today for storage as it is for operating systems and applications.

The future of Open Source storage software looks even brighter, considering recent developments such as Sun's donation of OpenSolaris, along with a wealth of storage technologies, and the Aperi project, a heavyweight-backed effort to create an Open Source suite of storage management applications. Spearheaded by IBM, Aperi also has the support of other key storage vendors including Brocade, Cisco, Computer Associates, Emulex, Fujitsu, LSI Logic, NetApp, Novell, and YottaYotta.

Why would these vendors share their expensive software development efforts with an Open Source community? Sure, there's no question they want something in return -- more users, more control over technology developments, more control over standards.

Nevertheless, gifts of Open Source are a welcome development in a fragmented market such as storage where standards work well for hardware but don't seem to apply to software at all. Storage needs fewer technology schools and more real standards. Open Source and community development have the potential to bring that about.

Open Source also has the potential to turn the storage marketplace upside down. Despite the plethora of vendors and storage solutions on the market today, you'll find little differentiation in hardware. In fact, many vendors share the same basic hardware and toss their management software on top of it. Some vendors don't offer hardware at all, opting to use commodity servers as their physical platform. After all, an Ultra 320 SCSI drive isn't exactly rare. If we're at a point where the hardware is nearly immaterial to a solid storage platform, then what's to stop an Open Source storage solution from making a dent in this market? Nothing.

The State of MySQL

For the first time in several years I didn’t find myself in California for the MySQL conference; the vendor and project’s largest gathering of developers, ISVs, and users.

My absence should not be read as a lack of interest, of course. It was rather the consequence of a particularly brutal stretch of travel. Had I attended, I would have been spending four out of five weeks traveling, at a time when I’m preparing for my annual transition back to the east coast for the summer. Plus there’s the fact that I just caught up with MySQL’s M�rten Mickos at the Linux Foundation Summit a week back.

Anyway, on the occasion of their conference this week and spurred on by a half dozen or so inquiries on MySQL related subjects from media and users alike, I thought I’d take a few minutes to weigh in on my view of the State of MySQL. Or more specifically and perhaps less presumptuously, my read on the current state of MySQL as it relates to technical capability, business models, and so on.

Before I continue, let me put the disclaimer up front that both MySQL and its new corporate parent, Sun, are RedMonk customers. So feel free to read into that what you will.
The Adoption

In an effort to explain the almost inexorable adoption of MySQL, Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz related the story of a visit he had with one of their customers who was “unknowingly” using MySQL.

Which explains everything you need to understand about the advantages of open source distribution, in my opinion. Not they are unique to open source, of course, as the mechanism I’ve traditionally used to explain the adoption to customers has had nothing to do with open source.

Some years ago in the early days of RedMonk I happened to find myself writing a piece on compliance trends as they related to instant messaging within the securities industry. In speaking to a variety of the technical higher ups at a dozen or so broker/dealers, I was told in response to my queries that instant messaging technologies were not a part of their business because IT had not issued them.

Portrait: Luis Villa, from Bugzilla to bar association

In many ways, the outline of Villa's career has been obvious from his college days, when he took a double major in political science and computing. At the time, he had no idea that the two might be connected. "They were just two things I was interested in. I had no idea that the two would overlap."

He first saw GNU/Linux briefly during his freshman year in 1996, when a friend installed it for a week. "Next year, I got really fed up with Windows, and my neighbor helped me install Red Hat 5.0, and I've been using ever since."

Before long, Villa saw the community as a place where his two interests could unite. "I was very curious about the non-technical aspects from day one," he says. "It was obvious to me that the core notion that a bunch of people could get together on the Internet and produce something was really revolutionary. It was just obvious that there was something important that was going on socially and politically."

Villa began doing quality assurance work for Mozilla. He made this choice, he says, largely because it enabled him to make small contributions without dedicating large blocks of time for any one project. By the time he graduated and started looking for work in Fall 2000, he had a modest reputation among friends for his understanding of Bugzilla, the well-known bug-tracking tool.

Ximian days

A couple of Villa's friends were among the early employees of Ximian. At first, Villa had little thought of joining them. "I'm a good programmer, but I'm not a great programmer, and at that time Ximian was only hiring great programmers."

Jealousy? Novell, Red Hat, and the Linux Desktop

Recently, both Novell and Red Hat went on record as dismissing the idea that the consumer Linux desktop is going to be taking off anytime soon. It’s not? Has anyone told Asus and Xandros? Everex and gOS? How about Dell and Ubuntu? They’re all doing great with consumer Linux desktops.

Novell actually isn’t taking an extreme position on the consumer Linux desktop. Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian on April 15th in India, according to an InfoWorld report, simply said that the consumer market is taking longer to develop than the business market and that “The market for the desktop for the next three to five years is mainly enterprise-related.”

OK, fair enough. I think the consumer Linux desktop is growing faster than he does, but he’s certainly right when he says that the Linux desktop is going to grow faster still in business. I mean, there must be some enterprises moving to Microsoft Vista, I just don’t happen to know of any.

For businesses that want a desktop upgrade and get ill at the very thought of dealing with Vista’s woes, SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10 SP1 deserves serious consideration. That’s especially true since businesses can now buy SLED pre-installed on Lenovo ThinkPads and the HP Mini.

Red Hat, though, in their announcement that they were giving up on their consumer Linux desktop plans went overboard. In their blog post, the Red Hat desktop team declared, “The desktop market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that today’s Linux desktops simply don’t provide a practical alternative.”

And this is news how? Linux, not just the desktop, but the now popular server, still suffered from fools that don’t realize it’s a mature, business and home ready operating system. If Red Hat had started out with a similar attitude when the company started that Microsoft and the Unix companies had too strong a hold on servers and that people didn’t understand Linux could work for them, Red Hat would be long dead. If you don’t believe in your product, how can you expect anyone else to?

The Red Hat desktop team then went on, “Of course, a growing number of technically savvy users and companies have discovered that today’s Linux desktop is indeed a practical alternative. Nevertheless, building a sustainable business around the Linux desktop is tough, and history is littered with example efforts that have either failed outright, are stalled or are run as charities.”

Sure, it’s tough. Selling anything new is always tough. Most businesses, whether it’s selling pizzas or operating systems fail. If you can’t deal with it, go get a job flipping burgers.

But, here’s the point Red Hat, there are businesses working with the Linux desktop that have not failed, not stalled and, frankly, I’m not even what you’re talking about when you mention charities. OLPC (One Laptop per Child)? The project is meant to do good, but it’s also meant to pay for its own. The OLPC sells XO laptops, it doesn’t give them away.

In fact, if you follow what’s been happening with the Linux desktop, you’ll see it’s doing great. Asus sold 300-thousand of its Eee PC series running Xandros Linux last year. This year, the Taiwanese company expects to sell 2-million of them. Sounds to me like desktop Linux is doing pretty darn good for them.

Everex hasn’t released numbers for its gOS-powered gPCs, but from all reports this Google-oriented Linux PC is doing quite well. Dell’s been selling some of its PCs with Ubuntu Linux for closing in on a year now. While, Dell won’t give out sales numbers either, as Todd Weiss reports in ComputerWorld, Dell spokesperson Anne Camden said, A [sales] number is not going to validate it as much as our actions to date.” Those actions have been to continue to add new Ubuntu-powered models like the Dell Inspiron 1525 and updating their systems with Ubuntu 7.10 and the ability to play DVDs..

Those are just the big success stories. You also have major retailers like Amazon, Best Buy and Sears now selling pre-installed Linux PCs. And, thanks to the Vista flop, Windows PC sales are actually declining.

Put it all together and what do you get? You get the best time ever for the consumer Linux desktop to gain customers’ attention. So, why is Novell lukewarm and Red Hat downright cool about home Linux?

Part of it is simply their business plans. Novell wants the business Linux server and desktop market. Red Hat is focusing on its servers and JBoss. But, you know what? I think some of this, especially from Red Hat’s tone, is simple, good old-fashioned jealousy.

Consumer Linux is now a success. But, it’s not Red Hat’s success. It’s the success of gOS, a distribution that came out of the blue late last year. It’s the success of Xandros, the oldest desktop Linux distribution but one that has never been that popular. And, last but perhaps most tellingly, it’s the success of Ubuntu.

There was a time when if you said Linux, people immediately thought of Red Hat. Now, except in server circles, if you say Linux chance are your listeners will be thinking of Ubuntu. Oh, and have I mentioned that Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu is targeting servers now? Could Red Hat be getting just a wee-bit jealous of the little people-friendly Linux that could? I think they just might be.

Original link: http://practical-tech.com/operat...

New OOXML Scandal - A Leaked Email Surfaces in France - Updated: New Details from Norway

Le Monde Informatique and LeMagIT are reporting on a leaked email from Marc Meyer of the French government agency, DGME, which urges that OOXML be quickly added to the official list of formats that can be used by government entities, a document titled RGI, and then the finalized v1.0 of RGI be quickly published, in effect locking in OOXML, before the appeals process is completed. The email and the media reports indicate that the RGI was put on a back burner last October, when ODF was already on the list, and now, immediately after OOXML is approved, albeit controversially, by ISO but before the appeals process is complete, not to mention the format, Meyer urges it quickly be added to the list of acceptable formats, hence making it hard to remove OOXML from the list later, as a fait accompli.

Worse, the email indicates that work on the document was brought to a crawl to wait for ISO approval of OOXML. ODF was already on the list when work on RGI was brought to a standstill last October. There were suspicions that the slowdown was deliberate, and the email is giving legs to those suspicions.

It seems that politics has reared its ugly head, and just as happened in Masschusetts, questions are now being asked about behind-the-scenes Microsoft pressure.

Meyer is the project manager in charge of the RGI initiative [in French "Chef de service DGME/D�veloppement de l'Administration Electronique"], of DGME (the French government agency tasked [PDF] with modernizing the French bureaucracy, which includes technical standards). Here's an article in French from 2006 explaining RGI.

ODF was chosen already, because it was already an ISO standard -- chosen but then the work on the RGI document [PDF; ODF mentioned on pages 30-32] inexplicably slowed to a crawl last October, or maybe more came to a standstill. Then the DGME withdrew its support for the ADELE [PDF] (ADministration En LignE) program. The ADELE site now redirects to a generic French government site list. The reports indicate that now questions are being asked, particularly after AFNOR affair, where the DGME representative and a colleague from the other French ministry DGE reportedly suddenly withdrew their opposition to OOXML, followed by France suddenly reversing its NO vote on OOXML and changing to Abstain.

I'm sure you can figure out what the advantage of the delay would be for OOXML or what the advantage to ODF would have been, had the choice been timely implemented. Even when technical groups choose ODF on clear merit grounds, it seems they simply are not allowed to follow through. Thou shalt use Microsoft. And what headaches are ahead for them! Here's a computer translation of the email:

"The project of RGI presented at the time of the last committee of the reference frames of October 12, 2007 had been put on standby, following the step engaged in the ISO by the ECMA concerning the OpenXML standard. This step having now succeeded, we held of it account and we wish to engage without delay the step of validation of the RGI, for a presentation of the project to set the numerical one of at the end of May 2008.