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On the other hand there is every indication Apple is willing to go to trial. As Larry Dignan noted last week, this could quickly put it into court against both Google and Microsoft. It would be a legal Vietnam.

Jason Perlow wrote last week about a technical cure for any problems caused by the suit — virtualization. You can’t sue what’s common, and virtualization could make a fight against rivals like trying to grab clouds.

The real cost in going to trial and claiming to own the smartphone space is more subtle. Apple could become a laughing stock, as SCO did. The intent of our patent and copyright regimes is to encourage innovation, not discourage it, and seeking control of the whole smartphone market does not encourage innovation.

There are enormous public relations risks in becoming a public plaintiff in patent court. Many people will, as a result of such a suit, avoid the plaintiff’s products as a way of weighing-in. This is what really happened to SCO — its sales dried up.
Had Apple sued Google directly, I might give credence to this. SCO sued IBM. You go after the strong when you seek to run the patent table.

Could that happen to Apple? Yes, I do. At least one market researcher thinks Android sales could pass those of the iPhone in two years.
Which brings me back to Microsoft.

I have written here that the way Microsoft views its own patent efforts, like its recent agreement deal with Amazon, is as a way to take patents off the competitive table. Microsoft is using legal threats to create patent peace between it and its rivals, freeing its engineers to concentrate on creating things, not dealing with lawyers.

Apple doesn’t really innovate. Apple doesn’t really litigate. Apple markets.
If Apple can settle these suits under favorable terms it can also win patent peace with Microsoft. This would free it to create iPhones as the market directs, rather than within constraints of lawyers and patent rights.
That’s the way I think it will play. Apple will settle. Apple is not stupid.

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Next week at the annual OSBC (Open Source Business Conference) in San Francisco, I'll be moderating a panel discussion on March 17 at 3 p.m. PST about open source and the cloud, and how the two play well together. (Note: fellow CNET blogger James Urquhart is a panelist.)

While open source offers users a great deal of control over their applications and data, the cloud requires users to not only follow the providers methodology, but also locks applications and data into a specific cloud platform.

The big question is if source code matters in the age of the cloud, and what do developers and IT staff need to know as their world evolves at a breakneck pace.

We'll also discuss whether any of this matters and if we've reached the point where consuming applications is more important than their origins and future plans. Maybe open APIs have supplanted open source?

Open Source and the Cloud: IT Opportunities and Challenges, March 17, 3 p.m.

Dave Rosenberg, Moderator
James Urquhart, Platform Evangelist, Cisco
Chris Mattman, Senior Computer Scientist, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Erica Brescia, CEO, BitRock

OSBC remains the must-attend open source event of the year. Stop by and say hello.

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The Genivi (pronounced jah-NEE-vee) Alliance is focusing on developing "middleware"--the layer of software that allows various kinds of information and entertainment applications to work together in the car. Middleware controls such functions as encoding audio and video signals and managing power use.

"It's the part that just makes it work," Genivi Secretary Kyle Walworth, a senior manager of audio and information/entertainment architectures at Visteon, told Automotive News at this year's International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Cooperation saves money

Walworth said sharing basic software development makes sense because it saves automakers time and money without raising competitive concerns.

Individual automakers choose and develop the applications that run on top of the software, whether it's a standard radio, navigation system, or entertainment screen that lets drivers use connected services such as Internet radio. Automakers also control the way drivers interact with technology--by voice, buttons, or other means.

Walworth said developing an information and entertainment system can cost tens of millions of dollars. "Sixty percent of that code is this underlying middleware, and it's not differentiating," he said. "It all does the same features, whether it's [for] a European OEM, a U.S. OEM, a Japanese OEM.

"It's in all the best interests of everyone in the food chain to work together on solving bugs and sharing that work back in the open-source project."

Traditionally, a company such as Visteon would work on an information/entertainment system using the same underlying technology as a competitor's but using proprietary software. The two companies would be reluctant to pick up the phone to discuss common problems.

Share bug fixes

"In an alliance we can do that. We can very openly share bug fixes," Walworth said.

Because alliance members are using open-source Linux, fixes in software bugs can be shared throughout the user community. Another benefit to carmakers is that many makers of consumer devices use Linux, he said.

Among the Genivi members are numerous consumer electronics companies, including Garmin, Nokia, Alpine Electronics, and Pioneer Electronics.

Said Walworth: "Automotive will never drive the consumer market. The consumer market moves so rapidly that we must grab that open source."

Software supporters

Here are some members of Genivi, an alliance of companies promoting open-source software as a way to save time and money when developing automotive infotainment systems.

• BMW
• Delphi
• Freescale Semiconductor
• GM
• Intel
• Magneti Marelli
• Navteq
• NEC
• Nissan
• Nokia
• PSA Peugeot Citroen
• Renault
• Valeo
• Visteon

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The launch of Open311 as an open API by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (right) and Obama CIO Vivek Kundra will not change this right away. Think of it instead as a last chance to interest cities in something the phone companies tossed over the side long ago.
There are several reasons for past 311 failures, some of which the open source API addresses, some of which it doesn’t:

The choice of what to offer on it is often a political decision, and inertia rules cities as well as Washington. It takes money to publicize and draw consumer interest to a 311 service. Political boundaries. Should individual suburbs have their own 311 services, or should they get together and make it a county service? Politics again. Implementation still takes money. An OpenAPI can help here by lowering costs and drawing interest through applications.

Mainly, 311 takes political leadership, and requires that someone invest political capital that might better be invested elsewhere.
In their press event Newsom and Kundra emphasized mobile apps. There’s an app for city government. But believe it or not smart phone penetration isn’t that enormous, especially in the poor neighborhoods that most need quick access to services.

Web interfaces are going to be important here. So may be the cooperation of schools and libraries, cooperation that may come with a price. The schools and libraries may want the bulk of the services without investing heavily in development. The risk is that open source may be labeled, as Kundra himself has been, as a phony if things don’t work out.

I’m personally more jazzed by the participation of  Newsom, because the San Francisco mayor is term-limited and looking for a place to land his career. There are ongoing reports he may run for Lt. Governor, maybe even for President.

But rather than run for anything at a time when being in public service is assumed to disqualify you for it, he might be better served seizing the opportunities Open311 affords. A foundation to run the .org, a company to run the .com, and the same charismatic gentleman on top of both. Government’s answer to Dries Buytaert, with better clothes.

Sounds like a better political plan to me. He can gain standing without taking responsibility for running anything, since actual implementation remains in the hands of local governments. He can take credit for success without risking much blame for failure. And he can make money doing it.

So along with the question of open source making 311 relevant, could it also make Gavin Newsom relevant?

Like many of you, I haven't given the Linux market too much thought beyond Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) being the leaders and Novell Suse running a distant second. Last May, while reading the Eclipse Survey 2009 results (see the chart below), I came across two very interesting pieces of data about Linux adoption that made me reconsider this point of view.

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I was very surprised to find that nearly 15 percent of Eclipse developers responding to the survey were using Ubuntu on their development machines. I rationalized the lack of Fedora/RHEL or OpenSuse/Suse usage versus Ubuntu as a proof point of Ubuntu's user experience investments. But then I realized that Ubuntu performed equally well on deployment server market share among respondents. Granted, Fedora/RHEL led Linux deployments, but only by a single percentage point versus Ubuntu. And yet, from a revenue and unit shipment standpoint, IDC estimates Red Hat's market share of Linux at more than 60 percent.

The surprising truth about Ubuntu adoption
Since May 2009, I've been keeping my eye out for data that supports Ubuntu's growth in the enterprise. Earlier this week I learned that Weta Digital, the digital effects studio behind movies such as "Avatar," "District 9," "Jumper," and "Lord of the Rings," is using Ubuntu on a large scale. Dustin Kirkland, an Ubuntu Server core developer for Canonical, wrote the following about Paul Gunn's Linux.conf.au 2010 talk:

It was a great talk, about the type of data center needed to render special effects in today's blockbuster movies. They have a 2-petabyte disk array, 10Gbps networking, and 35,000 cores (4,000-plus HP blades) in their data center, and still it takes 48 hours to render some of their graphic sequences.

According to Paul, Ubuntu is at the core of all of this, running on all of the rendering nodes, and 90 percent of the desktops at Weta Digital. He notes that his farm (he calls it a "render wall") is in fact an Ubuntu Server farm, and not RHEL as he has seen reported in the media.

Weta's data center is pretty amazing, especially in terms of its green data center practices. The work running on Ubuntu at Weta Digital could easily be considered enterprise grade:

... more than 10,000 jobs and an estimated 1.3 to 1.4 million tasks per day. Each frame of the 24 frames-per-second movie saw multiple iterations of back and forth between directors and artists and took multiple hours to render.

Canonical's strategy is to grow Ubuntu on client desktops, an area Red Hat has not tapped. However, as the Eclipse survey and Weta Digital's usage underscores, Ubuntu shouldn't be ignored as a server operating system.

It's time for software vendors to certify for Ubuntu
When you're considering Ubuntu adoption in your enterprise, particularly as a server operating system, you'll no doubt have concerns about its enterprise application support -- for good reason. Red Hat definitely enjoys a much larger software develoepr ecosystem than Ubuntu does today, meaning that enterprise applications are more likely to be tested and certified on RHEL than on Ubuntu.

However, with Ubuntu's growth and the uncertainty around Novell Suse, enterprise-oriented software vendors won't be able to delay Ubuntu certification for long. That will only help make Ubuntu's business case.

Follow me on Twitter at: SavioRodrigues.

p.s. I should state: "The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."

This article, "Is Ubuntu ready to run your business servers?," originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Rodrigues et al.'s Open Sources blog and follow the latest developments in open source at InfoWorld.com.

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The Android code was stripped out of the last kernel release, version 2.6.33, after Google reportedly failed to provide necessary changes and subsystem code required by kernel.org.

This led some to claim Google had forked Linux, a charge that was debated in a long thread among developers in kernel.org.

Google’s top open source program manager Chris Dibona said he doesn’t think the Android phone operating system code is any more a fork of Linux than Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Nevertheless, Google will be providing more code upstream to Linus Torvalds’ kernel.org going forward, he said.

“I would be comfortable saying that we’ll likely merge into the mainline in the next couple of years,” Dibona said in an e-mail response to this ZDNet blogger’s questions about the controversy. Android is “no more [a fork] than Red Hat Enterprise Linux or any other distribution vendor. All kernels are in some way a fork for some amount of time, the trick is keeping that delta small. We’re trying to do a better job of keeping a small delta.”

Dibona, for his part, maintains that the Android code is a lot different than traditional Linux code and more time is needed before the mobile system is integrated into the kernel.

“For the work we do on our non-mobile systems (our production kernels and the rest) we stay pretty close to the mainline nowadays, but android is not the same as some server sitting on the internet, and thinking Linux on mobile is the same thing as Linux on the server or on the desktop is why, until android came along, Linux on mobile phones was nearly totally unsuccessful,” Dibona wrote in a thread defending Google’s position on Linux 2.6.33. “Also, this whole thing stinks of people not liking Forking. Forking is important and not a bad thing at all. From my perspective, forking is why the Linux kernel is as good as it is.”

So when will the Android code make it into the Linux kernel?

In his online debate, Dibona said he expects to see it done by the time Linux 2.8 hits the streets. But in his email to this blogger, he was wary of framing it that way.

“2.8 is a concept that not all kernel developers embrace, so it may never occur,” Dibona wrote. “I would be comfortable saying that we’ll likely merge into the mainline in the next couple of years.”

“A better question might be ‘”Will we continue to work from the mainline for android?” and the answer is an unqualified, “Yes.”

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One of the main open source concerns about SaaS in the past has been that the largest open source outfits, like Google, don’t support true copyleft through the Affero license. Google itself prefers the Apache license to anything copyleft, and this is fast becoming the norm.
Buytaert believes open source companies can disrupt this model through services like his own Drupal Gardens, which allows exporting of codes, themes, and data to any other Drupal hosting environment.

My own problem with Drupal Gardens is more prosaic. It is entering what has become a mature space. It would be tough for me to move my current Typepad blog over there, for instance, or this WordPress blog. It would take technical expertise most users don’t have.

Also, the online excitement has moved on. Blogging, as a frontier, is so last decade. The talk today is all about social networking, about tweeting your tweets, either as part of a dialog or just for publicity. The lock-in, in other words, has already occurred and the world has moved on.
The good news is there are many areas of enterprise IT, like healthcare, that on the whole remain frontiers. SaaS is a big player in these frontiers. If users can be made to understand the issues they might press for the changes Dries seeks.

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Jaspersoft has amassed more than 10 million downloads since late 2001. While I'm always weary of download data after the 1 million mark, 10 million downloads place Jaspersoft in rare company among open source vendors. Jaspersoft also counts nearly 120,000 registered community members.

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Jaspersoft provided an estimate of its community contributions to open source, through work on the open source JasperReports, iReport, and JasperServer/JasperAnalysis:

Ohloh.net estimates Jaspersoft and its members have contributed nearly nine million dollars in full-time equivalent engineering investment to these projects.

I'm somewhat surprised that Jaspersoft's open source projects only amount to $9 million in engineering investment. Maybe Ohloh.net is only counting the investment since Ohloh.net was founded?

Another interesting data point is the difference between user and customer geographies:

Jaspersoft's community includes members in more than 150 countries around the world, with top ten memberships coming from Argentina, Brazil, China, Colombia, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Thailand and the United States. Comparatively, in the last year, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and France ranked among the top five countries with the highest commercial adoption of Jaspersoft products.

Jaspersoft appears to be monetizing usage in western markets today, while at the same time building a usage base in emerging markets which can be monetized in the future.

With Red Hat's recent interest in business intelligence and Jaspersoft's traction, one can't help but wonder what Red Hat is waiting for in this space. Keep in mind that Red Hat has previously invested in Jaspersoft. However, so has SAP. With SAP's increasingly warm stance toward open source, it represents another potential suitor for Jaspersoft.

While SAP's Business Objects division would compete with Jaspersoft, the combination of an open source, open-source-based, and enterprise commercial product line would be interesting from a competitive standpoint. Additionally, Jaspersoft's usage in emerging markets could be an opportunity to reach a set of customers that SAP may not reach effectively today.

Interesting times ahead.

Reading David Coursey's InfoWorld post "Palm is doomed; let the good-byes begin," I couldn't help but wonder what's next for Palm. As mentioned by Coursey and the Wall Street Journal, Palm has released strong products since relaunching on the WebOS platform, and it enjoys excellent carrier support. Yet this hasn't helped Palm's share grow:

In the nicest way possible, it (the Wall Street Journal) says Palm, with a mere 0.7 percent of the smartphone market, compared to 14.4 percent for Apple and 20 percent for RIM, simply can't catch up.

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Being acquired by RIM is definitely one answer to the "what's next for Palm" question. There is, however, the slight issue of Palm's $1 billion market cap putting a serious dent in RIM's $1.3 billion cash and near-cash position. However, RIM doesn't have any debt, so there's room to finance the acquisition. RIM's stock, while not priced where it's used to being, remains on most investor's tech stock short list and could help fund the acquisition. For our purposes, let's assume RIM could close the deal.

The larger question is "Why would RIM want to acquire Palm?"

Palm's 0.7 percent market share isn't reason enough to acquire Palm. RIM could get its share of that 0.7 percent as Palm users look for future devices from Apple, RIM, or Android phone manufacturers.

One reason to acquire Palm would be to leverage Palm's open source experience. I've argued that RIM could benefit from using open source more effectively in its business. Palm would jump-start this effort.

There is no such thing as automatic community, of course, so we see companies (big and small, but mostly small) either latching onto existing communities and then trying to monetize them. Or we see big companies kick-starting community, as Google has done with Android.

The downside to the small-company-big-community approach is that it can be hard to sell value around a community that is used to getting everything free of charge.

The upside to the big-company-create-community approach is that large-scale enterprises generally don't need to worry about selling value because they already have profitable product lines that complement the open-source projects they feed.

This has become an increasingly interesting approach for companies as diverse as IBM, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.

Indeed, open source accounts for much of the most interesting tech strategy such companies engage in. And for some companies, it's the only interesting tech outreach they do, at least in the view of this highly biased open-source advocate.

Despite this big company dominance in the more intriguing areas of open source, I don't think we need worry about "The Man" taking over open source. Open-source projects of all shapes and sizes continue to sprout and flourish outside the control of the enterprise-software hegemons, or by any company at all.

Sure, to thrive many will seek outside sponsorship, either from a VC or a strategic investor/partner like IBM.

But many others won't, preserving the rich tradition of both serving The Man and sticking a finger in his eye--often at the very same time.

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But open source could not have enforced rules on users as the proprietary companies could. Open source could not have the politicians’ backs as Microsoft might. And open source could not have obligated the next government, which may be much less friendly to the BBC’s interests, to support BBC technology, lock-in and user control the way a proprietary solution does.

Lock-in is not a bug but a feature. In any political setting — and even a private company boardroom is a political setting — that can be a real advantage. It’s something open source can’t match (thank goodness) but there it is.

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