Free Software Linux

I have two younger sisters who are currently in college - both at the same school. It’s a private college and has what I would consider your average IT setup for a campus. Within the first two weeks, both had their laptops infected by viruses separately - different viruses, different times. One was running XP, the other Vista on you basic Dell laptops. Of course, who did they call? Answer: me.

What does Free Software have to do with ending poverty? More than you probably think. It is not just at the core of consumer products like the Android loaded G1 phone from HTC, or the One Laptop Per Child XO. Linux operating systems like Ubuntu are deployed by community technology centers around the globe providing access to the internet, and all the information, data and resources that come with it. The Free Software (while having $0 in licensing costs) also reduces the cost of hardware, and allows programmers to improve upon it, and share their improvements without fear. read more

I had to read this article twice to ensure I was actually reading it correctly. Then I visited the Broadcom website and downloaded it just to be certain this wasn’t a hoax. Yes, Broadcom, the most open only about not supporting Linux has released an open source Linux wireless driver. And it’s really under an open source license. The source files I opened were clearly GPLv2. So Dell and Canonical forced them into it - but they did it. I’m honestly shocked. Linux has hit a critical mass. It may not be taking over the desktop world, but it has at least reached “Mac” support status.

Interesting article on the last ditch efforts of Sun to keep Solaris from dying. Personally, I think Solaris will die a similar death as IBM’s OS/2 did - slowly, with stalwarts hanging on as long as they can. http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_852573C400693880002574CE00371FE1.html I’m not sure UNIX in general is dead as AIX and I think even HP-UX have seen fairly strong growth recently, but Linux is certainly tearing up the industry like the good disruptor it is. I think another angle that was missed is the outstanding growth of Linux on Power and mainframe platforms - heck, even Sun has tried to put Solaris on an IBM mainframe.

I can’t make sense of the “all eggs in a Solaris basket” strategy Sun is on especially when I see Red Hat just launched economic concerns back into the faces of Wall St. analysts by posting 24% growth over last year. Jim Whitehurst seems to be doing just fine in the new role - the Qumranet buy was also brilliant. I have high hopes for what we might see come from the acquisition. And in other news, Oracle launched its own branded storage hardware product (made by HP) that is based on Linux. All around it’s been a positive day for accelerating growth of Linux.

The Chiphipper program is an interesting program where IBM gives its ISV partners access to a toolset that allowed them to validate their x86 Linux applications for Linux on POWER and z mainframe platforms. It may seem trivial, but ask any developer and the challenge of moving from one architecture to another without tools can be a pain. With Chiphopper, the process becomes fairly automated in discovering what needs changed before starting a port and makes it fairly easy to offer an application on multiple platforms. Developers use these tools on their x86 code so you don’t even need access to Power or mainframe hardware to use them.  You can even use the tools with open source applications.

Red Hat announced today that it will acquire Qumranet, the company behind KVM. Now Qumranet does not make its money on KVM, instead it uses KVM as part of its desktop virtualization solutions. Qumranet is also behind the very efficient SPICE protocol. I think this is a great move on both sides and I’m excited to hear a former IBM colleague’s bold move into a startup has paid off. I knew it would only be a matter of time before Qumranet was acquired, but it’s great to see it finally went through. Great ideas and technology leadership deserve to be rewarded. I think you can expect to see an increase in KVM usage in RHEL going forward ;-) I saw the press release here:

I always like to see innovation in open source software development because it flies in the face of many critics. Ars is reporting the Mozilla team has identified methods to improve Javascript interpretation performance by up to 40% in some case. Their goal is to make the interpreter faster so that many of the glitzy “web 2.0″ apps that we’re getting used to perform well enough for users. Obviously there seem to be no downsides here, but it also appears the new tracing optimization technique also opens the potential for future gains as well.

Savio posted a blog entry a little while ago that I missed until now (yes, I’m way behind on my RSS feeds). Anyway, after reading my blog post here on Microsoft’s annual report statements regarding risk from open source, Savio went and looked up what other software vendors state in their annual reports regarding potential business risk from open source software. The results are indeed interesting. Check out Savio’s analysis here:

Wow, some great quotes are included in this BusinessWeek article on Red Hat and open source software. It’s great to see Jim taking control at the helm. Certainly I agree with much of his views, however, I also see Red Hat in a business that needs to continue contributing to community efforts. While I know he’s guiding that as well, it does not really come out in these comments.

There’s a great book published over at the Linux Foundation that helps developers who are interested in participating in Linux kernel development and the process for contributing. This is a great resource and is probably one of the most difficult “cultural” and procedural issues for new, aspiring kernel hackers. I think it’s absolutely fantastic the kernel community itself has published a guide on how to participate. This will help significantly as the developer community has scaled already to a very large number of participants.

Internally within IBM we get to see a number of great adoption statistics for technologies and IBM products. One that has been increasing over time is the usage of Linux virtualized on Power Systems (e.g. POWER6 processor based servers). These systems were always considered “UNIX servers” and that was true in the old days. Today, with virtualization, how do you count a system that has 30% of its capacity dedicated to Linux partitions and 70% to AIX? How about 90% Linux, 10% AIX?  The same trend for adoption of Linux on scalable systems is true for Mainframes as well. These systems offer customers a significant amount of flexibility to match workloads and applications to the best hardware without disrupting the OS, tools, etc.

You need look no further than the most recent Microsoft annual report to understand that Microsoft still does not “get open source”. Let’s start with page 12, “Item 1A: Risk Factors”, first risk section:

I couldn’t help but find myself perplexed when I got an email on my iPhone yesterday from a well known figure in the Linux world. He (and subsequently I) were baffled that Sun must be combing through existing LAMP users for new references - LinkedIn uses LAMP. Well call me shocked… don’t 90% of the web companies out there run LAMP? (excluding those Microsoft has bought) I’m guessing the “new news” is that Sun signed up LinkedIn for a MySQL support contract for the first time, but are we going through a second LAMP hype cycle? http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/080728/20080728005247.html?.v=1

The SFLC continues to enforce the GPL on behalf of the BusyBox developers, this time against Extreme Networks. As usual, a lawsuit is filed after trying to work with the defendants to remedy the situation first. The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) today announced that it has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Extreme Networks, Inc. on behalf of its clients, two principal developers of BusyBox, alleging violation of the GNU General Public License (GPL).