Practical Technology

for practical people.

August 16, 2010
by sjvn01
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Ubuntu Linux to go multi-touch

I spoke with Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, this morning, and he tells me that Canonical will be bringing true multi-touch to Ubuntu Linux in Ubuntu 10.10 (code name Maverick Meerkat).

“Multi-touch is just as useful on a desktop as it is on a phone or tablet, so I’m delighted that the first cut of Canonical’s UTouch framework has landed in Maverick and will be there for its release on 10.10.10. This is being driven in part because many partners want touch across their equipment range,” Shuttleworth said.

This doesn’t mean that Ubuntu is heading towards making a Linux for tablets ala Android or MeeGo. “We don’t have a tablet edition, but you could certainly use Ubuntu for tablet with this. Our focus is on the desktop and netbook,” he added.

In particular, Ubuntu’s programmers are developing for 4-finger touch devices. “While you can use one or a two-finger touch device, after our developer sprint last week, the absolute consensus was that 4-finger is the way to go. With 4-finger capable pads, such as Apple’s Magic Trackpad, you can use the full vocabulary of touch gestures,” Shuttleworth said.

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August 16, 2010
by sjvn01
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Oracle dumps OpenSolaris

Okay, I tried to resist, but I can’t help myself: I told you so.

I’ve said for over a year that with Oracle in charge, OpenSolaris would be toast. I had people tell me that I was just spreading FUD. Even after it became abundantly clear that Oracle was going to let it die off, I still had people swearing up and down that Oracle would keep OpenSolaris going.

It’s over. OpenSolaris is dead.

In a leaked Oracle internal memo to Solaris developers, Oracle management wrote, "We will not release any other binary distributions, such as nightly or bi-weekly builds of Solaris binaries, or an OpenSolaris 2010.05 or later distribution." As the OpenSolaris software engineer, Steven Stallion, wrote, "This concludes over four years of effort that I (and many other external contributors) have worked on the OpenSolaris project. This is a terrible send-off for countless hours of work — for quality software which will now ship as an Oracle product that we (the original authors) can no longer obtain on an unrestricted basis."

Stallion concluded, "I can only maintain that the software we worked on was for the betterment of all, not for any one company’s bottom line. This is truly a perversion of the open source spirit."

To which I can only reply, welcome to the Larry Ellison school of open-source thought. As I’d been trying to tell OpenSolaris developers all along, the god-king CEO of Oracle doesn’t give a damn about any open source that doesn’t directly benefit Oracle. The moment Oracle acquired Sun, OpenSolaris’ fate was sealed.

This is all of a piece with Oracle attacking Google’s open-source Android. Oracle couldn’t care less that it’s a partner with Google in the Linux Foundation. Oracle is all about Oracle winning and devil takes the hindmost.

Red Hat, whose Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) forms the basis for Oracle’s’ Unbreakable Linux, could tell you all about that. Oracle is no friend to other Linux companies or the Linux community. Unbreakable Linux’s real point is to break Red Hat. Why would anyone who actually looked at Oracle’s business history think it would take a different approach with Sun’s open-source projects that didn’t fit into Oracle’s plans?

That’s why I think almost all of Sun’s open-source programs are in deep trouble. Oracle has already cut the lifeline for projects that Sun had been friendly toward, specifically the open-source PostgreSQL DBMS. By the end of the year, I suspect we can start writing open-source MySQL DBMS’s obituary. Other old Sun open-source projects will start getting their official pink slips around October.

Why October? Because that’s when Oracle can claim the projects aren’t profitable, and it’ll be long enough after Oracle acquired Sun to avoid any troublesome merger and acquisition legal questions. I believe Oracle always intended to let most, if not all, of Sun’s open-source portfolio die. I’m now surer of this than ever.

OpenSolaris itself may live on. The Illumos open-source project, founded by former Sun developers, is seeking to keep OpenSolaris going.

Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta, the company behind Illumos, wrote, "We’ve been planning for this contingency for a long time. We have the team to continue to support customers and partners and to continue our development. We look forward to picking up the appropriate pieces of Solaris when they are made available with Solaris 11 as well."

This won’t be easy. But enough of Sun’s top Solaris engineers have left Oracle for greener pastures that creating a truly open OpenSolaris is possible. Whether they can do this without having Oracle attack them, well, as Google and Red Hat can tell you, that’s another question.


A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.

August 13, 2010
by sjvn01
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Oracle vs. Google over Java in Android is only the start.

I don’t think Oracle suing Google over the use of Java in Android has much to do with Android at all. I think it has everything to do with Oracle monetizing Java anyway it can. That spells big trouble for any company or developer who uses Java but hasn’t obeyed the letter of Java’s intellectual property laws. I’m looking at you, Red Hat/JBoss; Apache/Jakarta; and members of the JCP (Java Community Process). Get ready. Legal trouble is coming your way.

I am not a lawyer, but I don’t think you need to be one to figure out why Oracle is doing this. Java and all its associated technologies are very valuable. Sun was never able to squeeze much money out of Java’s IP (intellectual property). Sun preferred to make its money by building programs around Java.

Let’s let James Gosling, Java’s creator, tell you his take on how he saw Oracle thinking about making money from Java: "Oracle finally filed a patent lawsuit against Google. Not a big surprise. During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer’s eyes sparkle. Filing patent suits was never in Sun’s genetic code."

Why pick on Google first? Well, to quote some of my more cynical lawyer friends, you always sue whoever has the deepest pockets first. As Willie Sutton put it when asked why he robs banks, "Because that’s where the money is."

Keep in mind that Oracle is headed by Larry Ellison, the dog-fighting pit-bull of technology CEOs. He’ll take on any company at any time if he feels there’s a chance that he can win. And Larry doesn’t lose very often, as those of us who follow Oracle know so well.

If Oracle goes after other companies that use their own house-brewed Java, these businesses will be in for a world of hurt. Most of them can’t afford lawsuits that may cost millions and last years. The whole secret of winning any lawsuit is being able to outspend and outlast your opposition. Few businesses have the resources fo fight a company the size of Oracle. Any resemblance between this strategy and that of many successful Survivor villains is not a coincidence.

I don’t how this is going to work out. I do know that it has every potential to be a defining moment not just for Android or Java, but for open source in general. When I broke the story in November 2006 that Sun was open-sourcing Java under the GPLv2, I didn’t notice that the Java specification patent grant that went along with it, and which came out in December 2006, is only valid if developers use fully compliant Java implementation. Oops.

If I were Google or any other company that has shipped Java spins-offs, I’d be worried. I have a sinking feeling that patent cases, such as this one, are going to be far more troublesome for Linux and open source than any of the bogus SCO copyright claims were.

As Eben Moglen, director of the Software Freedom Law Center, said at LinuxCon, the day before the Oracle lawsuit hit the fan, "Clarity in software patents isn’t coming any time soon," and "Large number of organizations with patents are still hostile to the GPL."

Who knew that Oracle, which has been an open-source supporter, would turn this nasty towards other open-source companies? Well, from what Gosling has said, Oracle did. This does not bode well for free and open-source software.

A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.

August 11, 2010
by sjvn01
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Novell takes SUSE Linux to the cloud with Amazon

BOSTON, Mass. — Novell was to have announced at LinuxCon that users will be able to run their own customized instances of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 and 11 on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. While the announcement was pulled at the last minute, I’m told that the marriage of SLES and AWS is going ahead.

Markus Rex, Novell’s SVP and General Manager of Open Platform Solutions, told me prior to the formal announcement that users will be able to create their own special SLES blend with SUSE Studio and then upload and use it on AWS. Once it’s there, you can pay Amazon to take care of all its updates, patches, and support. Or, if you’d rather, you can pay Amazon for a generic ready-to-run SLES server on the cloud. They’ll be happy to ‘sell’ you one.

This new offering will be available around the world, and you can pay for using it on an hourly basis. Essentially what Novell is doing here is making AWS a SLES reseller. In the background, Novell will be doing the heavy-lifting on support, but business users will have only one throat to choke if there are any problems: AWS.

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August 10, 2010
by sjvn01
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Linux Foundation launches major open-source license compliance program

BOSTON, Mass. — The Linux Foundation, the non-profit organization dedicated to supporting Linux, announced on Aug. 10 at LinuxCon the launch of the Open Compliance Program, a comprehensive initiative to help companies and developers comply with open-source licenses.

You may not know it, but getting businesses and developers to obey open-source licenses has become a much bigger problem over the years. I’m not talking about the differences between GPLv2 and GPLv3. I’m talking about companies using open-source code and not realizing that they can’t just use it any way they want.

This has become a problem because almost every major company is now using Linux and open-source software. That’s both the good and bad news. With so many companies using and, more important, incorporating free and open-source software (FOSS) in their products, there’s lots of room for businesses to make big mistakes.

That’s especially true in the mobile and consumer electronics space. All you have to do is look at the legal record and you can see that. Company after company builds some neat device and uses FOSS but then doesn’t bother to follow the rules on how the software should be used. Then, when they’re caught at it, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) or a private law firm comes down like a ton of bricks on the open-source license violators, and they have to pay for their sins.

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August 8, 2010
by sjvn01
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The Corporation has gone Open Source

While Microsoft and friends are doing their best to hide Linux and open-source software from the public, businesses have been adopting Linux and open-source faster than ever. That’s not the opinion of FOSS (free and open-source software) fans. That’s what Accenture, a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company with no particular love for FOSS found in its survey of 300 large private and public organizations.

Accenture “found that half of the respondents (50 percent) are fully committed to open source in their business while almost a third (28 percent) say they are experimenting with open source and keeping an open mind to using it. Furthermore, two-thirds of all respondents (65 percent) noted that they have a fully documented strategic approach for using open source in their business, while another third (32 percent) are developing a strategic plan. Of the organizations using open source, almost nine out of ten (88 percent) will increase their investment in the software in 2010 compared to 2009.”

In short, to quote, Accenture’s chief technology architect Paul Daugherty, “What we are seeing is the coming of age of open source. Through both our research and our work with clients, we are seeing an increase in demand for open source based on quality, reliability and speed, not just cost savings.”

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