Mixed Signals

This is a pure rumour, sourced from random tweets. But it comes from Miguel de Icaza, founder of Gnome and Mono, so it has a certain investment of radiance.

His first tweet:

"VMware is creating a new Linux distro, according to the recruiting spam they are sending on Linked In."

and a little later:

"Leaky VMware-istas confirm that VMware is creating a Linux distro. Investigative Journalist De Icaza signing off."

Nice work, chap. In subsequent discussions with other hacks, we agreed that it had a lot of sense behind it, although the thought of getting Linux support from VMware did rather unsettle some correspondents. The prevailing opinion, though, was "If they don't do that, where do they go?" - which has a certain logic to it.

More on this as it happens...

The news that Nokia is suing Apple over ten wireless patents marks the start of what may be a fascinating and prolonged canter through the worlds of mobile phone standards and intellectual property. (Alternatively, it could end up, as the Nokia-Qualcomm war did, in silence)

It's not generally realised that a lot of industry standardisation work is legal, rather than technical: a company that owns a useful patent which would work well in an international standard wants paying for it, but the standards body won't want barriers to adoption.

The mechanics of how this works vary from case to case - most commonly, an agency is set up which manages the pools of IP and offers an efficient way to license them. But whatever the details - and GSM is more gruesomely complex than many - there are fairly standard way to get the IP you need to make the goods that follow the rules.

Which means that cases like this, where an IP owner goes after a handset maker, are rare. We don't know the details of the case, but it's a fair assumption that it's going to have a number of unique aspects. Nokia isn't a patent troll, it's been in discussion with Apple for a year, and the manner of the action tends to support the view that whatever the outcome, Nokia genuinely believes it has a case and is proceeding as a responsible litigant would. Around $25 of the cost of a mid-range phone goes on GSM licensing, which means Nokia's claim of between $6 and $12 owed per iPhone is no small percentage of the total amount you'd expect. It all looks and sounds like a case with substantial grounds.

You wouldn't know that from the reaction online, though. Half the world has assumed that Nokia is doing it because it can't make phones as good as the iPhone, because it wants to cripple a competitor, because it's a cheap path to publicity, because its losing money and Apple has loads... well, pick any combination of greed, stupidity, ill-will, jealousy and desperation and you'll find someone confidently proclaiming that this is what's going on. Poor Apple, eh?

All of the above could be true, although I doubt it. Yet neither I nor you nor any of the shouty Apple fanboys know what's actually going on. So from whence comes their great confidence?

It could be that they hate patents in general, although it's hard to despise a framework that's helped create a global mobile phone standard with four billion users. It could be that Apple is always right, a shining example of wholesome propriety and not the aggressive, arrogant, secretive organisation some mistake it for. Or it could be that those darn Finns have no right taking a pop at America - World War III? Is there nothing the iPhone can't do? There's an app for that..

Or it could be prejudice informing an instant and gratifying group opinion.

Whatever the answer, the evidence is out there right now. Have a look and decide for yourself.

Citrix has today announced modifications to the licence options for its recently announced XenDesktop 4 virtual desktop product. When the product was unveiled two weeks ago Citrix revamped its existing licensing schemes, including dropping a per-computer option in favour of a per-user scheme. A number of existing and potential Citrix users pointed out that this would cause them substantial cost increases.

The company has now posted a blog entry on new licensing options that it says addresses this and other concerns. In the blog, Sumit Dhawan, VP for Citrix XenDesktop, says:

" Your feedback has been invaluable in helping us make sure XenDesktop 4 enables the broadest set of virtual desktop scenarios possible. As a result, we've decided to make three important new enhancements to XenDesktop 4:m [a] device-based licensing option, [a] VDI Edition available in both user/device and CCU licensing, [and a] Campus-wide Licensing Program for customers in the education industry"

This change follows the company asking for feedback, information and opinions four days after the launch of the product, when Dhawan said it first became aware of the issue.

"We have received the customer feedback and we are actively investigating appropriate licensing programs for XenDesktop 4 to address these use cases. [...] We are in the process of collecting some more information and we plan to share our solution to address these requirements within 30 days."

Ewen Anderson, MD of UK consultancy Centralis, told ZDNet “It’s not clear whether the earlier furore over licensing models was a real issue or just a mis-interpreted release, but Citrix have moved swiftly to dispel the dark clouds and thrown in the added bonus of the campus agreement. From both a customer and a partner perspective that shows a willingness to listen which will be much appreciated.”

Home Secretary Alan Johnson has agreed to delay the final deadline on Gary McKinnon's fight against extradition, after being presented with new medical evidence on McKinnon's psychiatric condition.

This follows McKinnon being denied the right to appeal to the UK Supreme Court, which would normally trigger a fourteen day window for an appeal to the European Court in Strasbourg.

According to the BBC, a Home Office spokesman said: "On 12 October his solicitors submitted further representations to the Home Secretary and we are considering what response to give to this latest material.

"In the meantime, we have confirmed to his solicitors that we do not consider the 14 days for a Strasbourg application as running."

It's nearly Wednesday, and the question of what happened to the Sidekick service remains unanswered.

At one level, it's obvious. T-Mobile US's Sidekick service, run by Danger and thus Danger's owners Microsoft, went down and stayed down. As the Sidekick mobile phones rely completely on the service to maintain their data – they're thin clients with only battery-backed local storage – this has left the users with nothing.

At another level, it's remarkably unclear. How can a company with the resources, experience and reputation of Microsoft allow a mission critical system to die beyond resurrection? The reaction of the punditsphere has been rapid, predictable and not unreasonable: this is the failure of the Cloud idea, this is a vindication of keeping it local, this proves Windows is useless, this is absolute proof of Microsoft's incompetence.

Not unreasonable, just not very right. If local backups never failed, then yes, that would be a killer shot against remote services. Cloud means many things, but it doesn't normally mean having a single copy of data running on a single system: Google's downtimes have been bona-fide cloud failures, but data has not been lost. And as for Windows being somehow at fault: please. Danger is an Oracle, Unix and Java outfit: unless the problem happened because the service was being moved to a new Windows-based system, then keep yer trap shut (and even if it was, the old system would have been there for fallback. So, no).

Which leaves Microsoft's incompetence. Of all the diagnoses, this is the most unanswerable. And while Microsoft has many very competent people, the loss of all data goes beyond personal incompetence. This has to be, at a very deep level, a systemic management failure.

And that is a truly dangerous perception for Microsoft. Forget about the loss of consumer confidence in Sidekick – that's gone, and won't come back. It's not as if the customers really knew or cared that Microsoft was behind their service. Management failure speaks most eloquently to enterprises, who know more than they know anything else that bad management is a corporeal disease that will ruin all else that is good and reliable in a company. It makes a partnership unconscionable: it doesn't matter if a business partner is evil, greedy, power-crazed or working to hidden agendas, you can work with all of that if it comes up with the goods. If it is incompetent, though, it is poison and can kill you. Run away.

There is only one course of action that will save the day for Microsoft, and that's a detailed, frank and complete explanation of what happened. That's very difficult for any company to do, let alone one so addicted to public protestations of God-like perfection in the face of what the faithless consider evidence to the contrary. Yet in this case, there is no other path to redemption.

Microsoft even has a template to work to. Earlier this year, the Apache Foundation had a very embarrassing and very public security failure. Hackers gained access to many of its public servers and installed scripts that compromised various Apache developer services. It took some time and a loss of service for Apache to recover from this: not what you want if you're responsible for the code that runs the majority of the Web.

Apache reacted well. After diagnosis and restoration, and having fixed the chain of vulnerabilities that exposed them, the Foundation published a very detailed account of what happened, how they recovered and why it won't be happening again. That account was sufficiently complete to act as a valuable and apt lesson for others who also run web services. Not only did it restore confidence in Apache, it took a bad event and turned it into a public good.

We still don't know what happened with Sidekick. There are plenty of rumours, including sabotage, Machiavellian actions by Microsoft to destroy confidence in the cloud, internal revolt and quite possibly alien action. Best guess? It was probably a failed upgrade that required data restoration from a backup that subsequently proved unusable – this happens. The golden rule, that a backup isn't a backup until it's restored, was ignored.

Microsoft needs to come clean. It needs to publish what it found in the wreckage, it needs to say how that happened and it needs to say what steps its taken to ensure that it doesn't happen again anywhere in the organisation. And it needs to do so in terms that the rest of us can use, to check our own systems and guard against our own tendencies to incompetence.

It needs to do this now. Otherwise, all we know is that the company is incompetent in delivering the core services it's trying to sell us, and it may not be able to cure that.

Enterprise poison.