Archive for the ‘ZD Open Source’ Category
Songbird, the open source media player, is now being embedded in Philips’ GoGear line.
This is a win-win.
Open source projects like Songbird often have a hard time being noticed by the general market, but now it will have the power of Philips behind it. Philips also has a business model that Songbird can take advantage of, not just in the hardware but through its existing site.
Philips, meanwhile, gets an excellent player that is far more competitive with iTunes than anything it previously offered.
This is the way open source is supposed to work. It’s supposed to connect with the market. If you don’t want your hands stained with filthy lucre you’re FOSS, not open source.
Songbird recently released Version 1.4.3 of its software. The new version has a warning against using it with Windows 7, but Stephen Lau writes that’s just a “caveat emptor” thing, that he knows of many users already running Songbird on Windows 7.
In the same post he notes that Songbird is no longer maintaining an iPod Extension, preferring to go with an import-export syncing function instead. “Playing an unsupported game of catchup with Apple sucked,” he writes.
On the Philips side, support is being rolled out slowly. Some new GoGear players will include Songbird inside. Others will have a support CD provided.
Yesterday’s piece on open source buy-outs drew many strong reactions, but the best may have been a link to a piece Michael Meeks has posted to GNOME on copyright assignment.
(Picture from Wikipedia.)
In yesterday’s piece the tie-dyed t-shirts essentially had a form of copyright assigned to the co-op which was eventually sold to WalMart. In software terms copyright assignment has always been controversial, and as Meeks writes it is going to become more so in the wake of the mySQL buy-out.
If you are writing as an employee of a corporate sponsor, whether that’s Novell or ZDNet, this assignment is not an issue. The rights to your work will follow the Golden Rule — he who has the gold makes the rules.
In the case of a community project it’s more complex. Meeks writes that the reputation of the sponsoring organization matters a lot, and that even the Free Software Foundation had its besmirched by the controversy over GPLv3.
The problem is that things change. He offers the example of Sun trying to monetize Open Office early this decade. The process leading to Oracle’s acquisition of mySQL is another.
Even the Linux user interface split, between KDE and GNOME, which newcomers to the space find impossible to understand, began with copyright assignment. KDE was based on non-free Qt, and while that software eventually went to the LGPLv2 it created a “vast amount of acrimony, duplication and wasteage that continues to this day.”
There are plenty of folks who respond to talkbacks here with disdain for community contributions. But such contributions go deeper than code. Anyone who reports bugs, or checks out beta software, is contributing to a project, even if no copyright assignment is involved.
In the end, Meeks writes, we’re talking about a trust process. Even asking for trust can damage this process, as noted in the research paper The Best of Strangers. Companies that demand copyright assignment attract fewer contributors, but managing a complex copyright regime, with rights held by outsiders, can be a nightmare.
Meeks ends his paper with a list of recommendations that add up to one word — beware. And he ends with a warning:
Civil law is there to help prevent the injustice of having your love and support sold out. A refusal to consider protecting the rights of the weaker party tends to confirm an intent to exploit. This of course applies as equally to trademark as to copyright ownership.
This may be one of the most important papers on open source since The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It is well worth your time to read it in full.
Let’s say you join a food co-op.
It’s an organic green grocer that slowly adds organic soaps, spices, teas, and meals to its line.
Over time a co-op member comes up with an idea for beeswax candles, another for loofah back sponges, and maybe you add tie-dyed t-shirts to sell at the local festival.
Not only do you spend your money with Hippy Dippy Foods and More, but you invest your time. You help stock the shelves. They give you a discount on your membership, but it’s the community you love.
Now let’s say the board of Hippy Dippy Foods and More sells out to Whole Foods.
Everything will remain the same, they say. We’ll just have more money to make more of the candles and back sponges and t-shirts. We’ll make them a national brand.
OK, you say. I can accept that. I may choose to switch my volunteer times to manning the booth at the festival. I’m proud of my tie-dyed innovation and the candles make great gifts.
Then WalMart buys Whole Foods. And if you protest you’re told to shut up by the local paper. It’s business, you’re told. You don’t own the stock, you have no say. You never really did.
That’s a bit how the community stakeholders at mySQL have felt, watching the project get bought by Sun and, more recently, Oracle. It may be how Zimbra clients feel, watching their software get taken over by Yahoo and, now, VMWare.
It was, let’s put on a show, who’s got a barn? Then, we’re off to Broadway, see you in the funny papers.
Now it’s true that programmers who helped build mySQL and Zimbra don’t own the project. They don’t have a legal claim on the businesses their code built.
But there is such a thing as moral equity. What was us is now you, and you sold out, why shouldn’t I be offended, and why should I trust anyone like you again?
You got my help based on an honest copyleft license, I let myself become dependent on that goodwill, and now I’m supposed to smile because you sold out to the guy I invested so much in you to avoid?
What concerns me in this example is not so much what Oracle or VMWare may do with their asset. It’s what people who have invested time and money in open source communities may now decide to do.
What’s next? Wikipedia bought by the Encyclopedia Brittanica? Firefox gets gobbled by Microsoft?
Legally, the analysts telling mySQL’s community to shut up are saying, yes, it could. And you couldn’t say a thing about it. That’s just capitalism.
It may be, just as Tom Sawyer’s game to get his friends to whitewash Aunt Polly’s fence was capitalism. But when Mark Twain wrote that his sympathies weren’t really with Tom. He was satirizing capitalism itself, and telling young readers to be wary of its glib promises.
Those waiting for Samba 4 might have to wait a little longer — but it will be well worth the wait, developers say.
In a team blog posted on Christmas Day, the Samba team announced it will merge the existing Samba 3 backbone services, the file and print server and Winbind identity mapping code, with the Samba 4 Active Directory code.
“Obviously this will require quite a lot of merge work, but we believe this may be possible to achieve in 2010,” the team’s holiday posting announced.
So it sounds like the release date is looking like late 2010 but it could well push into 2011.
The team has never formally announced a date of release for the much anticipated 4 upgrade, but many expected its arrival in the near future.
Samba 4, after all, has been worked on for more than five years and the new Active Directory code is being used in production at some customer sites. Additionally, the Samba 3 Windows NT4 compatible Domain Controller is not being widely deployed because there aren’t many customers that don’t use Active Directory today, the team freely acknowledged on its holiday posting.
So why do it? To ensure compatibility, the team blog said.
“This way people with an existing Samba 3 production product or sites will have a stable and predictable upgrade to the Samba 4 release,” according to a statement on the blog. “Our goal is to keep the code-base stable and minimize the impact of these changes on our users and vendors.”
The integrated product will result in name changes. The Samba 3 file and print server will become the Samba file and print service, the Samba 3 winbindd will be known as the Samba identity service and the Samba 4 Active Directory will be named the Samba Directory service.
There’s much to look forward to in the new version, according to the team blog.
The Samba file server is now fully cluster aware and is currently being extended to include the new SMB2 protocol and full Windows ACL support. “If you want to produce a clustered version of a CIFS file server, check out clustered Samba – it really is the only proven working product out there,” the blog states.
Additionally, Samba plans to release a sample implementation of SMB2 in the forthcoming Samba 3.5.0 update. Microsoft introduced a new version of the CIFS protocol — SMB2 — in Windows 7.
This fall, five Samba4 developers worked hands on with Microsoft developers to enable Windows to establish a trust with a Samba 4 domain. After much work, they were able to demonstrate Samba 4 as a viable option as a peer domain controller in an Active Directory domain. This clearly shows the advanced nature of Active Directory support in Samba 4.
“This was the first time that Samba4 had hosted an AD domain that a Windows DC found sufficiently acceptable to replicate the whole directory, and be comfortable to set itself up as a peer domain controller,” wrote Samba developer Andrew Bartlett in an October 2009 blog shortly after the demonstration. Samba 4 will be “able to host such domains alone or in partnership with Microsoft’s Windows.”
Of course, it will take time to merge the Samba code bases and iron out all of the Microsoft compatibility issues before release. But the team won’t ship the Samba 4 code until it is ready.
“Once we have a merged code-base, we’ll declare victory, ship Samba4 and have the biggest darn release party since Duke Nukem Forever shipped and revolutionized computer gaming,” the team quips on the blog.
Meanwhile, the Samba team announced that it will move to a more predictable release schedule this year. The next version is Samba 3.5 and updates will follow every six months, the team promised.
During the decade that ends today open source went from being almost an underground movement into a dominant business model.
(Anyone who didn’t go through an M.C. Escher period during college needs to go back. This is his famous crystal ball.)
One by one the niches fell. And while proprietary vendors could still innovate around and beyond open source, most found it necessary to make peace or die. Sometimes make peace and die.
So what might open source do in the teens? (At least we have a name for this new decade. We never settled on a name for the old one.)
I know what many in the business will say. Open source will be assimilated. Everything will be mixed source. Products will be a melange of licenses — enough to make you feel it’s open, but not enough that you can avoid paying the guy at the bottom of the stack.
This seems a reasonable attitude because so much open source is moving into places where business models are established and reasonable. Hardware, the cloud.
- You buy hardware at a store, it moves through the channel, and it doesn’t matter whether the software inside is open or closed. Is there really a difference between a Google Nexus One and an iPhone, from the transaction point of view?
- You buy services by the month or the user or the hour or the project. What’s really the difference between a fee for cloud services and a software license for an anti-viral? One is monthly, the other annual. Is that all the revolution was for?
But in fact much has changed, and we won’t go back. Commodity software has a shelf life now. You can no longer demand renewed payments for the same old same old. Someone is going to deliver an open source competitor and take your market.
Then there is the problem of Windows. This is not open source’s problem. Some might argue that the Internet, from which open source is born, caused the problem, by letting hackers deliver attacks from anywhere, just as the Internet lets anyone build and deliver open source software.
Some will argue that solving the problems of Windows and security will mean closing off the Internet somehow, that it will require user licenses, audit trails of every online session, an end to anonymity.
I may be wrong, but I don’t buy this. I think it’s software, not the Internet, that has to change. I think either Microsoft solves the problem or open source will solve it and eliminate the need for Microsoft. This tension will be one of the decade’s biggest stories.
What will be some of the others?
Assuming the Gizmodo report published by C|Net is accurate, Google plans to police the open source Android ecosystem by delivering its own phone starting in January.
The Nexus One is not designed to beat other Android phones, but to deliver the base technology at what Google considers a fair price, $180 with a two-year contract and $530 unlocked.
Other manufacturers will be free to innovate on top of the Nexus, creating their own user interfaces, applications, and price plans, but if they fall short or even sit on level terms with the Nexus One, buyers will go Google.
Note the contrast with Apple, which rigidly controls its entire ecosystem and fights both technically and legally to make certain no one goes outside the lines it draws.
Note also the contrast with Microsoft, which controls its software but avoids competing with hardware OEMs.
Note too the fears of many that by delivering an open source design Google might lose complete control of its own market. The Nexus One is its answer to that.
Google will freely let you do better, or go cheaper, and it will let you buy an unlocked handset built entirely on open source. But its market will be highly competitive, with the Nexus One guaranteeing other companies deliver value for money.
It’s an interesting approach. Does it meet with your approval?
Do you want Windows XP, can’t afford it, but don’t want to pirate it?
Then you want Ylmf, a version of Ubuntu Linux with the XP interface tacked-on, and Wine added so you can run Windows programs.
Google translates the name Ylmf as Rain Forest Wind, which may be the most creative piece of today’s story. This is a bit like a gust of wind in a rain forest — ephemeral, strange, but of little real moment.
So what are we to make of Rain Forest Wind?
You can see this as good news. Geek.com says it’s getting harder to run a pirated Windows in China.
You can see this as bad news. Softpedia calls the new software willful infringement of Microsoft’s user interface copyrights.
Or you can see this as no news at all. Linux Insider notes that Ylmf emerged just a few weeks after Phrank Waldorf posted a similar hack. It’s very possible some Cantonese entrepreneur just translated some commands on the software Waldorf himself said he didn’t recommend, calling it a script written as a programming exercise.
What this story tells me is that the entrepreneurial search for a quick buck remains alive on the Chinese mainland.
There were many Americans back in the 1980s anxious to clone a user interface, stick their name on it and try to download a few bucks from the wallets of the unsuspecting. If this “author” can scam just one small manufacturer with an “OEM deal,” he’s going to be a happy bunny.
But this story also illustrates something important about the Internet that gave birth to open source. Things like this are easy to do, they’re easily discovered, and (assuming there is a legal violation here) easy to close down.
If our Chinese friend’s mark has Internet access, and I’m assuming he does, and if he has more than two brain cells to rub together, and I’m assuming he does, then he won’t be taken in by this scam.
Mozilla is moving closer to the release of its first mobile Firefox browser.
The alpha 2 version of Fennec was made available on Dec. 22, one Mozilla developer announced.
The BBC, quoting a Firefox mobile developer, noted that Fennec is only day’s away from release.
“We’ve made major strides improving startup performance, panning and zooming performance, and responsiveness while pages are loading,” wrote one Mozilla Fennec developer, who announced the release of Alpha 2 on his blog. “In addition to the great performance work, we’re starting to work towards feature completion. We’re making great progress on our Windows Mobile builds and are starting to roll on Symbian.”
The mobile browser runs on Nokia’s 810 Internet tablet and Nokia 900 smartphone, which run the Maemo Linux based operating system. Mozilla has also provided versions of Fennec for Windows, MacX and Linux desktops for developers.
Mozilla also plans to support Windows Mobile and Symbion mobile operating systems.
Fennec includes touch-screen support, a password manager, pop-up blocker and Firefox-style tab-browsing interface.
This was a hard year.
It was a year where “working for” became a danger signal. Anyone whose salary came from someone else was looking over their shoulder all year long, waiting on the lay-off notice.
And it came for millions. The year became known as the Great Recession.
Positive growth numbers returned by the third quarter, but unemployment remains stuck at 10%, and underemployment is even higher.
Hard times.
Erica Zeidenberg at Palamida recognized this in February, and offered the suggestions for what became the 2nd most-popular post on the blog all year, Open source for hard times. (I owe you, Erica.)
Erica offered a list of some good software that you can download free and get real use from. I was well acquainted with many of these programs, but some, like OpenGoo, were frankly new to me.
She didn’t just line up the usual suspects, in other words. I appreciated that.
I illustrated the piece with a classic photo of the Great Depression, by John E. Allen Inc., of men trudging past a sign put up by a local chamber of commerce reading “Jobless men keep going. We can’t take care of our own.”
It is useful when times are hard to recall that times have been harder, and in the lifetime of people still living. My mom lived through the Great Depression. She’s 86 now, and coming in next week for a visit. We’ll talk about it.
If you know of any Great Depression veterans, talk to them this Christmas. They would love hearing from you. They won’t be with us forever.
But when they’re gone we’ll have your stories and memories of them.
If there was one word that could get Open Source readers more passionate than Microsoft in 2009, it was Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is not the most profitable Linux, and it’s not the distro with the biggest penetration of any major market.
But partly due to its commercial arm Canonical, based officially on the Isle of Man but actually located in London, Canonical’s charismatic CEO, Mark Shuttleworth, and to its desktop ambitions, it is the Linux distro you most liked reading about.
I was only dimly aware of this at the start of the year. But I learned.
Ubuntu 9.04 to be available for download Thursday – Here is one place I learned. Paula’s story on the approaching release of Ubuntu 9.04 was the 12th most popular story of the year.
Paula’s story quoted heavily from the Ubuntu Web site. She has a talent for hitting important stories just when they hit the Web. It’s probably one of the reasons y’all like her. I’m a fan, too, as previously noted.
Will Ubuntu remain a minor player — I wrote this soon after returning from Taiwan, where Windows was ubiquitous and Ubuntu barely seen. I was frustrated by the software’s lack of presence in the channel. In a way I felt I’d been had.
You responded to my frustration with 386 talkbacks, a rating of +19, and by turning this into the 5th most popular post of the year. Some were short, some were long. My favorite subject line was probably “Linux is the OS of the future and always will be.”
Ubuntu Karmic Koala launches – I snuck in ahead of Paula on the release of Ubuntu 10, and was rewarded with 174 talkbacks and 54 votes, making this the 3rd most popular post of the year.
One thing that jumped the numbers was that I jumped the gun. I hit publish based on an early version of the release, and when the time came but the software wasn’t there immediately the desk took over.
They issued multiple corrections until the software was posted, mentioned the story in the newsletter, and basically cleaned up after me.
After 5 years at this desk the editors have learned a few lessons too.