Open Sauce Software
Tasty titbits from people using Linux and other open source software in business.
Thursday 29 November 2007, 8:13 AM
Linux in directory catch-up with Windows 2000?
An arresting link pops up over at eWeek, where Jason Brooks breaks off from a consideration of the new autumn season versions of all three free Linux distributions - Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSUSE.
"Why is Linux stuck playing catch-up to Windows 2000?" asks Brooks, and his answer is that in Windows 2000, Microsoft started delivering Active Directory, a scalable directory server to which all Microsoft products have access.
There isn't a comparable open source directory rallying point, says Brooks. A couple of responses point out that there isn't the same need, apparently because Linux is inherently multi-user.
But I wonder if he has a point. When Novell was still attempting to compete against Microsoft with a broad brush, it certainly made NDS (now eDirectory) a major part of its strategy. Based on LDAP, it would be open, and more powerful and scalable. In the way of things, it probably was.
But is there a need for "one" open source directory server? There's currently Fedora Directory Server and OpenLDAP. Or are we back to the argument over whether innovation and diversity is good or bad?
Monday 26 November 2007, 3:48 PM
Can Linux forget desktops and servers?
While Linux might be able to gain share at the expense of the still-unpopular Vista, it's possible that tired old PCs aren't that important anyway.
There's a whole lot of other platforms out there, commentator Glyn Moody reminded me last week, mostly smaller than the laptop.
There's the Asus Eee PC, and an expected rush of other devices, joining the few that have seeded that segment, like the Nokia N800 tablet.
There are phones, too, with Android expected to make an impact.
There are two important drivers going on here
One is that as hardware gets cheaper, the operating system makes up a greater proportion of the cost. Buy a £1000 laptop and a £100 operating system seems a reasonable thing. On a £300 laptop it's a major part of the cost, and on a £200 Eee-style system, it's out of the question.
This gets even more pointed when you realise that any laptop also needs apps software. At the current entry price point of laptops, the £100 or so that Microsoft asks for a cut-down copy of Office looks out of proportion - especially when openoffice does more or less the same thing for free.
The other factor is that handheld devices really do need something different from keyboard driven PCs. With a small screen and limited input options, users are much less tolerant of woolly UI thinking, and there are fewer benefits to the "familiarity" of Windows than you might thing.
Windows Mobile hasn't done that well outside the US, which has always been a smaller and freakier mobile phone market than you might expect.
Outside the US, Symbian has had the lion's share of smartphones, and in the US, it looks like Apple's iPhone will draw off a lot of the non-corporate people who can choose phones, who might otherwise have gone with Windows Mobile.
So, while desktops and servers remain the most important space for now, the oft-predicted shift to other formats could still happen, and Linux might gain a lot from it.
Thursday 22 November 2007, 2:34 PM
How important is GPL enforcement?
On one level, the activity of the Software Freedom Law Center seems a bit perverse.
It has now taken three companies to court for not obeying the GPL licence, a role in which they follow the well known campaign of Harald Welte, who has forced companies like Skype to comply with the rules, and make source code available to their customers.
The end result of Welte's efforts tends to be a download page where a vendor, caught red-handed not distributing source code, makes that code available to customers that have bought, say a Skype phone. It's an offer that I don't imagine many people take up.
But there is a principle here. The original software has been given for free, and any developments to that software should also be given away - and that means publishing the source.
That's something the Center spells out.
What feels odd is the sight of a law firm going to court with a licence complaint - not trying to restrict the distribution of something, but trying to enforce its wider distribution.
Friday 16 November 2007, 1:53 PM
Forrester notes the Vistification problem
This new Forrester report - on Vista adoption - is going to be one of those publications which gets cited, quoted and spun till no-one's quite sure what it is about.
The report title How Windows Vista Will Shake Up The State Of The Enterprise Operating System, doesn't sound like a big vote of confidence for Linux, but that's one strand of the way it's been reported.
You need a Forrester subscription to read the report, but the news point seems to be that Vista adoption in the enterprise is pathetic, at two percent, while "84 percent of PCs in North American and European enterprises [run] Windows XP and just 11 percent [run] Windows 2000", according to the author Benjamin Gray, who had a survey done of 600 enterprises.
In fact Europe's Vista adoption in the enterprise is even less - more or less zero, while the US rate is around three percent, according to Matt Broersma's report at Techworld.
"Linux is becoming a credible threat to Windows on the desktop, and will grow over the next year as its distributors continue to work hard at making it an enterprise-class offering," says Gray. Which is a fair commendation.
But that's faint praise compared to this line from the report: "Vista's biggest competition is not Apple or Novell or Red Hat, it is Microsoft itself with XP."
Friday 9 November 2007, 5:10 PM
Red Hat's chutzpah
The webcast for Red Hat's in the Cloud announcement this week was tough going. A whole lot of jargon, no comparisons offered to other companies' abilities, and repetition of phrases like "anything anywhere anytime".
If nothing else, it showed Red Hat's ability to adopt the mannerisms of so many other corporate computing companies.
But the stand-out was the company's bald assertion that what they are doing is so good, it could be on half the world's servers in 2015.
Now, with Microsoft out there, THAT is some claim!
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