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First Android phone will not be competitive
Do not call an Internet terminal a phone, put a high price on data, show something that is not innovative and expect big success.... Continued »
August 19th, 2008
I am I, GoogQuixote, the lord of free wireless
Google is tilting at windmills again.
Having lost the auction for abandoned TV frequencies (while winning some “open access” rights), Google has now launched a campaign called FreeTheAirwaves aimed at making the “white space” between auctioned channels unlicensed.
Needless to say, broadcasters and auction winners are not amused. They are already expressing their opposition, and given the Bush Administration’s past positions are very likely to win this round.
The question is whether those forces will remain dominant, given the realignment due to follow the November elections.
Both sides claimed victory in recent technical tests. Equipment makers said their systems worked. The licensees claimed interference. The FCC sided with the licensees.
Technically there is no reason why 21st century technology should not be able to avoid interference, especially if the power of unlicensed gear is limited.
The success of WiFi, and the lack of traffic in adjacent licensed spectrum, attests to this. If necessary unlicensed gear could turn itself off automatically in the presence of licensed signals.
But, as I have noted here many times, this is not about technology. It’s about politics and power. It’s about maintaining monopolies.
If more unlicensed spectrum is released, the value of licensed spectrum is reduced substantially, since carriers will no longer have a monopoly on nationwide networking.
This will reduce what they’re able to charge, reducing their total revenue, and reducing the value of those spectrum licenses. The government, which made billions on those licenses, will have a problem.
The carriers will have a bigger problem. Stock analysts are already souring on them. Their most valuable assets are their shared monopolies in wireless. Lose those monopolies and the whole house of cards can come crashing down.
Given all that, can consumers and businesses which would benefit from enhanced wireless traffic overcome the monopolists and their co-conspirators in government?
It won’t be easy. Even with Microsoft acting as Sancho Panza Google may be tilting at windmills. Unless you believe otherwise and act on that belief.
August 19th, 2008
Can sites violate net neutrality?
For the last year Disney’s ESPN has been trying to bring the basic cable model to the Web, charging ISPs to let their subscribers deliver its ESPN360 service.
In this case Comcast, which we have been hammering on here for throttling BitTorrent, is the innocent victim. Rather, you might argue its subscribers are. Or, you might argue its’ competitors’ subscribers are. Read on.
In flogging the service in February, ESPN executives were quite explicit, claiming future growth for ISPs will depend “on the value of the content they offer.”
So far AT&T and Verizon, have jumped at the chance to make their services “better” than cable Internet, even at a price. Most cable companies are holding firm. In July ESPN claimed it had 30 deals.
So, is this a violation of net neutrality? If subscribers could buy their own subscriptions, at some price, I would see no problem. That’s not being offered maybe because ESPN failed in this area with its Insider service.
Advocates for the phone companies insist this is a good thing, that ESPN360 would not exist without such “experimentation.” What is in fact happening is phone companies are charging non-fans for something only fans want.
Will it work? There are already indications ESPN is hedging its bets, adding free access to colleges and the military, admitting in February it had streamed only 500,000 hours of programming.
Personally I’d be pissed if my ISP were charging me for something I wouldn’t use, giving in to a site owner too lazy to manage subscriptions.
As mad as I am at my cable operator for doing essentially the same thing?
August 18th, 2008
Carnegie-Mellon freshman gets first Fedora scholarship
Incoming freshman Ricky Zhou of Carnegie-Mellon University (go Tartans) is the first winner of a Fedora Scholarship, funded by Red Hat.
Zhou is an active member of the Red Hat Fedora community, working on the group’s web site and infrastructure. He has also worked on localizing the project Web site.
In addition to getting money for college Zhou wins a trip to the project’s annual development conference, FUDcon.
There is a FUDcon scheduled for the Czech Republic next month. I suspect RedHat is actually sending him to the December conference in Boston.
The scholarship project is a win-win-win. You raise the profile of major open source projects, you honor contributors when they’re approaching career decisions, and you win scads of free publicity.
Like this.
August 18th, 2008
Forbes rewrites the history of open source
In the name of defining jargon, Forbes this week tries a complete rewrite of open source history.
This is accomplished by someone named Dan Woods, who calls his company Evolved Media. (He might want to rename it Unevolved Medium.)
Woods does this by ignoring Eric Raymond’s ground-breaking The Cathedral and the Bazaar, making Richard Stallman the father of something he frankly detests.
Stallman personally lectured me on this when I first took this beat, so I’m not getting this from examining fossils or old newspaper clippings. It’s from the horse’s mouth.
Stallman believes in free software. What he now (reluctantly) calls the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement defines four freedoms for code — freedom to hold it, to see it, to fix it and to keep others from stealing the fix.
These freedoms — critics call the fourth an obligation to give away improvements – are expressed through the General Public License (GPL).
Raymond’s concept was quite different. It accepted the idea of commercial interests from the start. It saw new business models evolving from shared development effort.
His vision has now become reality.
While many open source companies use the GPL, others prefer BSD-type licenses, like the Apache and Mozilla licenses. They let companies hide their improvements and profit directly from them. Both types of licenses now seem to be legally enforceable.
Woods, for some reason, insists on calling open source “commercial open source,” when the whole idea of open source was that it would be commercial.
This way, I suppose Forbes‘ editors get to twit the hippies and claim that open source is no big deal.
In fact, open source is a very big deal.
By sharing code under development, development costs are reduced. By making full use of the Internet, distribution costs drop to zero. By giving away code before asking for support contracts, marketing costs fall to the floor.
This is an immense revolution in the way business gets done, which Forbes lets Woods deliberately ignore.
Why? Maybe they just don’t like Stallman’s hair. Me, I remain highly jealous of it. I wish I could grow some.
Just as I remain in awe of Stallman’s intellect, and that of Raymond, and that of everyone else who has remade the computing world through the miracle of open source. And those who continue to do so.
August 15th, 2008
Levin out as Black Duck’s CEO
Black Duck Software — a pioneer in the open source legal consulting business — has lost its CEO.
On Thursday, Douglas Levin, the company founder and a director at the Waltham, Mass.-based company, announced his resignation, effective Sept. 1.
The announcement came the same day that a federal appeals court issued a decision maintaining that open source licenses are valid under copyright law. Black Duck Software is a software and services company that advises developers and corporations about open source licensing requirements and compliance.
Are the two related?
No, Levin said in a broadcast email and blog posted yesterday.
“Friends, with this email and other announcements today I started the process of transitioning out of the CEO position at Black Duck Software as we start the search process for my replacement. As the founder of Black Duck I have been a member of the Board of Directors from its inception,” he wrote. “Starting on September 1st I will continue in my role as a member of the Board of Directors and act in an advisory capacity to the Office of the Presidency, extended executive management team and, in general, the company.”
“This is not a sudden decision … quite the opposite,” he wrote. “It has been planned since early this year. It has taken months to put into place. I am doing this now because Black Duck is in great shape. We have a very experienced executive and extended management team in place; engineering, sales and marketing, and other operational parts of the company are very strong, and the market for Black Duck technologies and services is very strong. I have the desire to investigate some promising startup opportunities. I will begin customer and market research soonafter taking a nice, long vacation.”
He pledged to work with existing management to help run the company’s newly formed Office of the Presidency.
August 15th, 2008
The biggest open source threat to Microsoft
Virtualization.
It’s not the Linux desktop. It’s not the cloud. It’s not applications like Firefox.
It’s virtualization. (Picture from Red Hat.)
I’m not talking about a particular virtualization scheme here, like Xen, OpenVZ, or Virtualbox.
It’s virtualization itself, the fact of it. Virtualization means you can run Windows applications on a Linux desktop. Virtualization is the secret sauce behind the cloud.
Virtualization makes your underlying operating environment irrelevant. It has to make its case based solely on performance.
Windows can’t win that fight. Linux is more modular, it has a longer history, it’s more efficient with system resources. That’s why it’s so strong in the server market.
Sure, in theory you could do a complete rewrite of Windows, using virtualization to achieve the backward-compatibility which has been Microsoft’s alpha-and-omega, and which has become the anchor holding it down.
If it’s any good we’ll write a virtualizer for it, or emulate it.
What virtualization does, simply, is knock the pins out of Microsoft’s business case, the idea that the operating system is beneath everything and he who controls the foundation controls the world.
Maybe in video game players.
Before leaving you for weekend cogitations, of course, I should also ask what might replace the operating system as the foundation and control point for computing down the road.
I have an answer there, and it’s not going to please open source advocates. It doesn’t please me one bit.
August 15th, 2008
First Android phone will not be competitive
It’s official.
On September 17, HTC will debut its first phone based on the Android specifications, on T-Mobile’s network.
Here’s a YouTube of it. It’s called the Dream, it’s made by HTC of China. It features a touchscreen with icons, and five buttons on a slide-out pad.
A live demo of the phone appeared in May.
While the HTC has some of the look-and-feel of the iPhone, I am underwhelmed. This is only partly because it looks so much like an iPhone knock-off.
It’s also because, as VentureBeat reports, T-Mobile is going to launch the phone with a special, high-priced data plan. In other words they’re going to discourage people from using it for its central purpose, as an Internet terminal.
Why? Probably it’s because the T-Mobile network has less bandwidth than other carriers. In any case it’s an unfair test.
Don’t call an Internet terminal a phone, jack up the data rate, show something that’s nothing but me-too, and expect big success.
I doubt we’ll get any real Android answers until after the Sprint-Clearwire-Google WiMax network starts to roll out.
August 14th, 2008
U.S. Internet down by law, not market
Markets evolve naturally toward monopolies or shared monopolies.
This is like the “climax state” in an ecosystem.
(To the right, an analysis of the UK entertainment market from Ofcom, for the BBC.)
Antitrust law acts like a forest fire in such an ecosystem. It turns a peat bog back into a swamp. It lets the redwood spread its seed, and creates new competition.
It was to guarantee competition that the U.S. passed the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and many other countries, like the U.K., followed suit, separating the ownership of infrastructure from control of the customer.
During this decade the U.S. has reversed course. Only the phone company can provide you broadband over “its” lines. Same with the cable operator.
The result is a duopoly. You don’t have choices. You pay $40-50/month. And the most efficient way to raising profits for the providers is by limiting your access to bits.
The incumbents even have the lobbying muscle to restrict competing technologies, such as wireless. Our electromagnetic spectrum has been sold to the same monopolies who control our broadband, and they are fighting every attempt to create competition.
Contrast this with the U.K., which has not allowed this climax state to come about (so far).
There has been consolidation, but the market has 5 major players, and several minor ones. Consumers there pay the equivalent of just $20/month for broadband, and can choose to get it through a mobile phone carrier “dongle.”
ISPs are free to set terms and conditions of service, but if those terms become onorous the consumer can simply change carriers. The incentives are in favor of better service and faster speeds.
The point is that the “absence of government interference in the market” so beloved of the monopolist is, in fact, interference on the monopolist’s behalf.
It’s a choice we have made, to run our Internet market this way. And we can make another choice.
The U.S. Internet market needs the equivalent of a forest fire. We, the people have the power to start one.
August 14th, 2008
Open source licenses are valid
For years critics of open source have noted that the licenses had yet to be tested in court, and therefore might not be valid under copyright law.
Now they have been tested. They are.
At issue in Jacobsen vs. Katzer/Kamind was the Artistic License, a somewhat unusual open source license with provisions for attribution, copyright notices, tracking of changes and availability of the underlying program.
Jacobsen had licensed DecoderPro, a program for controlling model radios railroads, and Katzer, operating as Kamind Associates, used it to create The Conductor, a competing product.
A lower court had called the violations “contractual promises,” not violations of copyright. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the top court covering patent law, disagreed, calling them covenants and conditions covered by copyright.
Here’s the key finding:
Copyright holders who engage in open source licensing have the right to control the modification and distribution of copyrighted material.
The choice to exact consideration in the form of compliance with the open source requirements of disclosure and explanation of changes, rather than as a dollar-denominated fee, is entitled to no less legal recognition.
Lawrence Lessig, who has pushed the validity of open source licensing for years, was ecstatic.
“This is the theory of the GPL and all Creative Commons (CC) licenses,” he wrote. “Put precisely, whether or not they are also contracts, they are copyright licenses which expire if you fail to abide by the terms of the license.”
So when you break the terms of an open source license you are committing a copyright violation. Creative Commons has the same power under law that the record or movie industries do.
August 13th, 2008
No retail channel for laptop Linux
As promised, I sent a reporter into local stores this weekend, looking for laptop Linux.
To protect my identity, I disguised myself as a 63-year old Vietnam veteran named T. Bass. (OK, I bought him lunch and he called me when he finished.)
Tommy visited chain stores in Atlanta and Columbus, as well as a small Atlanta retailer, and drew all the blank looks I expected.
One Geek Squad member suggested he go online, and said Dell is selling kit. An H-P representative he happened upon admitted they got nothing.
This is why Linux remains, in the desktop and laptop space, a hobbyist market. It only exists through the online channels hobbyists use.
This is true even though Linux is lighter in its use of system resources than Windows, and many popular applications come in Linux versions.
Of course, when Wal-Mart offered bargain Linux boxes last year they flew off the shelves. It’s not a question of demand.
It’s a question of supply. Retailers insist on higher-priced goods for the sake of their margins. Microsoft’s policies push manufacturers into putting Windows on everything they push down the channel.
Yet I’ve seen how Value-Added Resellers can up-sell hardware and capture niches for Linux, in areas like retailing and education.
For most consumers, however, there’s still a big gap between them and a Linux laptop. Stores.
August 13th, 2008
Who owns the Internet?
Open source depends, for its very existance, on a free, open Internet, in which commerce is frictionless, with no barrier to entry, no cost for distribution, and very low marketing costs. (Picture from UC Berkeley.)
Without it an outfit like Excelsior, located in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, wouldn’t stand a chance, even in its home market. It would be like Tom Lehrer’s song about the great Lobachevsky.
Over the last few months a number of stakeholders have tried to forcefully control the resource. The question for users and the industries which depend upon them is, what are you gonna do about it?
The most important threat comes from infrastructure owners — mainly the phone and cable duopoly. It started with the throttling of BitTorrent, a service many open source projects depend on for distribution, to protect their video monopolies.
Now, in a response to the FCC ruling that throttling is illegal, they’re talking about metered pricing, which is bound to limit usage.
None of this would be possible if consumers had choices in the market, but over the last decade the U.S. government has helped create, and then endorsed this duopoly.
Why? It’s easier to control a resource with a small number of stakeholders than one with many. Getting IP traffic shunted to it took the government just a few phone calls. If the market were more diffused it would have been impossible.
There is a second risk to government control of the resource, which is that it can be militarized. Evidently that happened during the recent Russia-Georgia conflict.
Which brings us back to Novosibirsk. Sure, the company can set up servers outside its home country. But if stakeholders or government control the resource, they control the economy which depends upon it.
That’s why the issues of Internet control should deeply concern those in the open source world, and why we need to get far more deeply involved in Internet governance issues than we are.
It’s our roads they’re blocking.
August 12th, 2008
Firefox 3.1 beta freeze delayed until September 9
The beta of Firefox 3.1 has been pushed back to mid September.
At the Mozilla group’s weekly meeting Tuesday, one developer said “there is a big gap between the features planned for 3.1 and what will make it if we freeze on the 19th.”
Some of the features planned for 3.1 — including bulk tagging, Javascript enhancements, cross-site XHR and workers threads — are not going to be ready by the end of the month.
Since the team is pushing back the beta code freeze for three weeks, users won’t have it in hand until mid next month.
The Firefox team originally planned to freeze the beta code on August 19th but have now set the date for beta freeze on September 9. In the interim, the team will freeze the code for alpha 2 on the 19th.
Alpha 1 was released on July 28th. Beta 1 is now tentatively scheduled for September 9th. Based on the input during the 75 minute meeting, the pushback has more to do with the heaver summer vacation period than technical difficulties.
August 12th, 2008
Supporting the long tail of open source
Most enterprises, and most individuals, use a small number of open source projects.
LAMP stacks are big. CRM and ERP systems, based on databases, are also big. Applications like Firefox, Open Office and The Gimp are very, very big.
But there are many, many smaller projects, with specialty capabilities used by only a few. How do you get support on them?
The simple answer is to contact the developer and offer to write a check. But the skills of a good developer and a good support person are different. Few good developers have patience for stupid people with questions.
Roberto Galoppini and I chatted about this yesterday. I smelled an opportunity. He expressed reservations.
The context of this was an OSCON meeting which Roberto attended where the Open Solutions Alliance indicated that most open source customers use at least one product from this “open source long tail.”
Dominic Sartoro called this the “open source mediation conundrum” and it bears watching. Because, as Roberto notes, software has to work together or the whole system crashes. It’s not like books or music where long tail products just need shelf space.
Proprietary companies have a simple solution to this problem. They limit their product lines. Open source does not have that luxury.
So how do we support the long tail of open source?
August 11th, 2008
Open Health Tools gets first big donation
Open Health Tools, the open source project launched this spring by Eclipse founder Skip McGaughey, has gotten its first big code donation.
It’s called Open HIE, or Open Health Information Exchange. It consists of modules to link a master record to personal information, and to retrieve records from known locations.
The donor is the California Healthcare Foundation, and the donation was midwifed by two important open source companies, CollabNet and Palamida.
CollabNet provided its development platform to the project, and Palamida has already done a code review on the donated code base.
The software itself is descended from code used to create the failed Santa Barbara County Care Data Exchange in 2006. The idea of Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs) has since spread nationwide.
August 11th, 2008
Open source offers a seamless transition to work
Amid all the talk about the value you get programming in open source, or the worry about a declining IT job market, one fact should rise above it all.
Open source makes a seamless transition from school to work. (This view of my own alma mater, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, was taken by Bond’s Girl in March, and posted on Flickr.)
This isn’t just true for programmers, although it’s true for them in spades. Programmers can create projects, work with professionals, measure their productivity, and know their value long before they get a diploma, thanks to open source.
It’s also true for other professions.
Nowhere is this more true than in business school, where many Internet start-ups have been launched by people while in school or in their first year after graduation.
All the disciplines of modern business, from marketing to operations to support, can be modeled while in school, and their impact on the bottom line measured, so there’s no surprise when you get out.
This may be the biggest, and most welcome, change from when I came up 30 years ago. Which leads me back to the picture above.
In the 1970s journalists especially were taught to be divorced from the market. Your job was to work for someone who bought ink by the barrel. If you bought it yourself you were no longer a journalist, but a publisher.
Those days are over. If I could give a j-school student one piece of advice it would be to consider yourself an entrepreneur starting now. Build a specialty, build your credibility, measure your success (or lack of it) with readers. All the tools are there.
The one thing publishers have going for them that you won’t find on your desk now is a scaled advertising effort, professionals who can get a high CP/M for those hits you’re generating.
And if you can generate an audience, they’ll come banging on your door.
So generate the hits now. Create a beat. Gain a reputation. Cover stories in different ways, and see what works for you. Let the market be your teacher and your guide.
As this realization hits more professions, the idea that you can model the job you want, and actually do much of it, before you seek a job, this border between school and work will get fuzzier-and-fuzzier.
Now if we could just get our schools and colleges to realize it.
August 11th, 2008
The kids are all right with Linux
School starts early in Georgia. The kids are all back at it.
It was on a pre-semester visit to my son’s high school that I got a shock on Friday.
The PCs were gone. In their place were banks of terminals, with small flat-panel screens, all hard-wired to the desks. A teacher’s son was messing with one, causing a reboot.
And that’s when I got the shock. Linux.
Apparently my son’s school spent the summer ripping out the old PC system and replacing it with a centralized Linux server and terminals.
Now here’s the real shocking part.
No one noticed. There’s not even a mention of it on the school Web site.
The kid who re-booted his machine didn’t notice. Within a few minutes he’d found the Firefox icon and was back on Cartoonnetwork.com. (I think he was 7.) His brothers and sisters were all happily online as well.
The new system should be more rugged than the old, the terminals are cheaper to replace, and the central system is physically inaccessible, so there will be less mischief. Before any kid can hack into it they have to learn some Linux.
Our previous years’ experience with computing has been a terrible disappointment. A few teachers got themselves Web pages, where they listed assignments and grades. Most didn’t.
Why? Because not all the kids have home access to the Web like my son. And the school system was unreliable. Let’s see what happens with Linux.
The real story is how transparent all this is. It’s much like the system my pharmacist got last year — a vendor did it and there’s no learning curve because all his applications are still there.
This is how Linux is slowly taking over. The pharmacist’s salesman gave him a better deal on printers and integration. The school system is delivering more power to more kids, with less maintenance.
Where have you seen Linux lately?
August 8th, 2008
Open Gear and cloud infrastructure
We talk a lot about cloud computing, but not much about the enabling technologies.
Virtualization is a key, often done through an open source Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). Then you need switching to move these machines about, turning mere hosting into a cloud that can serve any size business, with the hardware abstracted from the software.
Finally you need to manage that infrastructure, which is where Open Gear comes in. They were at LinuxWorld this week, introducing a gateway console that lets you bring legacy IBM gear to the party.
Between customers CEO Bob Waldie gave me a few minutes of his time.
“There is an awfully large investment in legacy IBM management infrastructure. It would be imprudent for a lot of companies to replace it, when they can use it to meet their needs,” he said.
While a lot of KVM technologies are now built into processor platforms, Waldie said, there is still a lot of old kit which must be retrofitted. That’s his sweet spot.
“The marketplace we’re serving, the management of infrastructure and power, that market segment is growing. Particularly in tough economic times you have to lift your quality of service in a far more cost effective way.
“Our pitch is we offer value, integrated solutions, one box that lets you manage everything.”
The efficiency of Linux in using system resources makes it a great choice for controlling the cloud, but beneath that management layer you can run anything — any application stack and any operating system. It’s all good.
This is where the market is growing, Waldie said. Clouds under Linux.
August 7th, 2008
Dell now ships XPS and Studio notebook with Ubuntu Linux 8.04 factory installed
Dell has launched an XPS and Studio notebook with Ubuntu Linux 8.04 factory installed.
The two models are the Dell XPS M153On and Studio 15n. Dell “recommends Windows Vista Home Premium” for both of these models, according to the Dell web pages for similar models.
Here’s the quick blurb from Dell’s popular Dell2Dell blog:
“Today is the day. For customers in the United States who interested in compelling notebooks with 15.4” Hi-def widescreen displays the Dell XPS M153On and Studio 15n notebooks are now available with Ubuntu 8.04 factory installed,” according to the blog posting, by Daniel Judd, product group strategist.