Open Sauce Software

A survey - dontcha love surveys? - shows that Most Linux distros are running better websites than Microsoft.

Over one month, Microsoft's home page was down for one hour and 19 minutes, according to website monitoring company Pingdom. The survey also looked at 16 Linux distros, as well as Apple - and found that almost all of them did better, with most doing substantially better.

Mandriva, Mint and Arch had more downtime - Arch had a weekend outage - but Fedora, Knoppix, Mopis and Red Hat all had no downtime at all, and CentOS and Ubuntu also came in under Apple's impressive two minutes of downtime in the month.

The story on download times is similar. The HTML on Microsoft's page took just over a second to download, with only three Linux distros (Arch, Gentoo and PCLinuxOS) taking longer, while only four distros (Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu and Damn Small) were less than Apples 448ms.

The figures don't mean a great deal, of course. All the Linux versions have a lot less resources, and have to support a lot less traffic than Microsoft.

Still, the Apple site must have similar levels of traffic to Microsoft, and - on this month's showing - is handling it better.

And I like Pingdom. Last time I looked into one of its surveys, I discovered that Cubans prefer Linux to sex.

There are Chinese web browsers, of course: there are about 250 million Internet users in China. But there's a bit more to the Chinese Firefox than simply a browser that can display Chinese characters.

The new version, just announced includes a new feature: Live Margins.

It's a new sidebar on the right, and apparently it is "a unique solution to the longstanding problem of tab browsing where only one tab is visible at any time". But it also gives "additional search results, relevant information, music, video, and much more," so I'm not that clear what it does. There are screenshots on this Chinese language page.

Whether or not this is a fundamental advance, it is also localised, including information from the Chinese Youtube, and Chinese sites for music and other information.

It's come from Mozilla Online, the Beijing-based Mozilla subsidiary, an outfit headed by an interesting sounding guy. Li Gong has in his time been chief Java security at Sun, before returning to China to head up Sun's research there, and then running Microsoft's MSN in China.

I don't know if we'll see Live Margins in English-language versions of Firefox - maybe it won't read so well with Western reading patterns? - but I think this is a sign of the times. I expect to see more open source form China in future....

Thanks to Glyn Moody for the link.

The open source world isn't all sweetness and light. Novell is trying to take business from the market leader in Linux servers, Red Hat - with a switchover campaign.

As in many such campaigns, Novell is offering incentives to companies that decide to move to its product. The interesting thing is that a major one of those incentives, is short-term technical support for the user's Red Hat operating systems during the switchover.

In anything but open source, that would be a very difficult ptomise to make, points out John Fontana at Network World. Patches for proprietary software are commercial products, just like the software they patch; but there's nothing at all to stop Novell from distributing open source patches to the open source Red Hat operating system.

If nothing else, the move will increase competition and keep Red Hat looking at the terms of its own support contracts.

Huawei's announcement of plans for an Android phone are another endorsement for open source on handsets. And it's also an unusual one.

It's tempting to over-analyse this, as the actual announcement was quite a passing mention by the handset division's marketing chief, given through an interpreter to four UK journalists on a visit to the company's Shenzhen headquarters.

Huawei will be launching phones based on Android and Symbian early in 2009, James Chen told us. He didn't give many details of what or when, but the promise of smartphones - and open source ones - is an interesting one from this company.

Huawei Terminal, the division which makes phones, is self-effacing. It makes what the operator requires, and leaves the labelling to the operator. This is a contrast to the only actual Android vendor so far, HTC, which has built quite a name for itself, supplies phones to operators and also sells phones itself.

Huawei has so far dealt with "featurephones", the not-so-dumb devices which have a camera and email, but no open, extendable platform. It makes a Windows Mobile smartphone, but now plans two more operating systems.

Significantly, Chen said Huawei was keen on open source as a means to increase customisation in its phones, something that Windows Mobile does not allow.

There are details unexplored here - how does the requirement for sharing source code get met, in a white label phone? - but If Android is going to take over significant amounts of the phone market, and not a nerdy subsector, it's this sort of vendor it needs to get on board.

The open source community will be resting a bit easier - "abstract" patents, for business processes have been ruled out by the US authorities, at least for now.

The US patent office rejected an application by one Bernard Bilski, for a business process and, after an appeal, that decision has been upheld. The issue was taken up by the open source community, and Red Hat in particular.

I've been travelling, so I've picked this up a week late, and now only have time to point you to the Groklaw report and Red Hat's explanation of its significance to open source.

There's more - much more - discussion since then, on Groklaw.