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'Whole Web' is the OS of the future

Lotte Nielsen — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:25:00 +0100

And it threatens to be controlled by open-source savvy, data-rich companies like Google.

On Wednesday in San Francisco, O'Reilly closed the first day of the Open Source Business Conference by shaking up some comfortable assumptions of the open-source commercial ecosystem, which has tended to focus on commoditizing established markets with low-cost, high-value distribution, all driven by open-source licensing.

This is nice, according to O'Reilly, but a pale shade of the real value that open source provides. It also conveniently forgets the real operating system of the future, which is the "whole Web," according to O'Reilly, and not Linux.

Linux, of course, has been essential to the economics and technological underpinnings of the Web. But it's a means, not the end. Indeed, while open source has been critical to the creation of cloud computing it may, as O'Reilly warned, "change the world in some ways that are inimical to the ideals that gave birth to open source."

The basic idea is that open-source software is being used to create the on-ramp to data lock-in on the Web, in the cloud.

But it's not just open source that is fueling the data gold rush. O'Reilly sees the cloud future filled with intelligent sensors (Fitbit, iPhone, etc.) that feed data to the cloud, where it is processed and accessed via the Web, generally using open-source software. Over time, these online services will connect and collaborate in the cloud, making the data even stickier.

In other words, more lock-in, as O'Reilly declared: "The lock-in of today is through massive databases that are so hard to re-create because they get better the more people use them."

To be a player in such a market requires huge resources and massive amounts of data. As Peter Norvig, chief scientist at Google, suggests, "We don't have better algorithms than anyone else. We just have more data."

Traditional open-source vendors and projects, according to O'Reilly, have lacked the resources to manage such data, preferring instead to fritter away too much energy on arguing how many open-source licenses would fit on the head of a pin (and still be compatible).

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O'Reilly pointed, instead, to the open-source principles that have fueled Google and other data-rich companies, and argued that such principles offer a better way forward for the "open-source industry."

The danger, however, is that while open source is "the tool of the underdogs," helping Google to use Android to threaten the iPhone, for example, the underdogs eventually become top dogs and may use the power granted them by open source to lock in customers.

According to O'Reilly, Google appears to be "trading for its own account," using its services to drive other Google services to the exclusion of third-party providers, which may make Google an open-source paved one-way street into lock-in.

It's a problem of rising concern to free-software advocates like Eben Moglen.

In sum, while "the operating system of the future is the whole Internet," the lock-in of the future may well be open source-enabled data. Hardly the house that open-source developers from the Linux, MySQL, and other communities intended to be built.

Open source makes another move on Wall Street

Lotte Nielsen — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:16:28 +0100

I say third because Marketcetera’s open source trading platform, under the GPL, has been gold for almost a year. A SaaS version of Marketcetera for portfolio management was also released last year. (They must be working hard there — their latest blog post is dated November.)
Still Marketcetera is a start-up, Bloomberg a major player.
Bloomberg announced its Bloomberg SYMbology (BSYM) would be available free back in November. That news was noted mainly by insiders. Promotion alongside the New York Stock Exchange is a big deal.

So what’s going on?

The stock symbols you see in a newspaper don’t fully describe what you can buy and sell. Go to Bloomberg’s site for its open source symbology and input a known stock symbol — any symbol.

What you will probably see are page-after-page of puts and calls, at different dates, on different exchanges, from different sources, in different configurations. (There are 78 pages of these for Google alone.) Getting the best price through an automated system requires that your computer know all the unique identifiers for these securities.

This is a big part of Bloomberg’s “secret sauce.” Until recently you could only get this data through a Bloomberg terminal, using an expensive Bloomberg data stream.

So why is Bloomberg publishing these codes, and in time its algorithms for making them? Are they crazy?
As the A-Team Group noted when the symbols were first released in November, they are crazy like a fox. Here is why:

Trading is moving toward higher levels of abstraction, with people replaced by computer programs. Releasing the codes gets Bloomberg inside these new programs, and makes its data feeds important in this new method of trading.

This is a real shot across the bow at Standard & Poor’s and Thomson-Reuters, its main rivals. Both are being investigated in Europe for the monopoly created by Reuters’ Instrument Codes (RIC), the main BSYM rival. Now there is a free alternative. And if you’re getting the codes free why not buy the data?

It’s a good lesson in what might be termed the offensive use of open source, as opposed to its defensive use. Open source can force open opportunities that companies were locked-out of, just as it can maintain customer loyalty for services and support.

I will be interested in seeing what Marketcetera does with this news. With open source symbology and data feeds, open source trading platforms can get much more powerful.

'Fastest broadband in EU' in election promise; Open source debated

Lotte Nielsen — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:33:01 +0100

As with the 2009 US elections, the technology field has been widely debated and is set to be a major swaying issue between the main political parties.

The current opposition, the Conservative Party, is pledging to enable Britain to become the fastest broadband country in Europe if they win the election, attempting to make available 100Mbps to most residences by 2017. They also, according to the BBC, in line with launching their digital and technology manifesto elements, want to create a “next generation of firms like Google and Microsoft”.

Basic background information
The UK has two main political parties (and a third, which represents a small but significant minority) as does the US, Labour and the Conservatives, which in some way can be compared to the Democrats and the Republicans loosely , respectively, as per their political persuasions. The elections will be held at some point before June 2010, and though the date has not been announced, many expect it to fall in line with previous election dates in or around the 5th/6th May 2010.

The current Labour government created the Digital Britain report which laid out detailed plans to roll out 2Mbps broadband to every house in the UK by 2010, which is currently on track. The report also delved into anti-piracy methods which would potentially cut off pirates and illegal file sharers and peer-to-peer users should they become repeat offenders, which even some government departments including MI5 opposed. The broadband roll out have been paid for by a 50p ($0.75) tax on every landline household bill per month to generate around £200 million ($300 million) a year towards the program.

This is a similar project to the US National Broadband Plan which pledges to ensure that all US citizens have the ability to access high-speed broadband. Tomorrow, the FCC will unveil a national broadband strategy which will promote national infrastructure needs through education, jobs, health, energy and security, “laying the groundwork for investing in America’s future”.

Read more: National Broadband Plan: Forever in Beta is a good thing

It is fair to say that the next-generation technologies, even though the vast majority of consumers have been engaged with them for years already, will be rolled out as part of Government 2.0 on both sides of the pond.

However, the Conservatives policy on wider access broadband to rural areas could see their major voting constituencies missing out on the fast Internet access. Though the Conservatives will scrap the 50p tax on landlines per month, which was implemented to fund countryside broadband, the major areas of Conservative voting power could suffer most from the decision to hold back on subsidising rural super-fast broadband.

There is little mention of open-source technology in the Conservative manifesto, whereas the present Labour government seems relatively keen to promote the idea. This, proven almost, by the release of a large amount of raw data by the government onto the web, spurred on by World Wide Web creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

According to the Telegraph, it was down to current Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who put forward the honour of bestowing a knighthood upon former Microsoft chairman, Bill Gates.

So in a nutshell, Labour will continue to support Digital Britain in nationwide broadband access, while the Conservatives will scrap the 50p tax demolishing Labour’s plan, but instead hold off a few more years to enable everyone across the country access to fibre-optic connections.

But with open-source being somewhat embraced by the government in schools, perhaps the Conservatives would be better off trying to firm up some plans to enable open access to free, open-source software within their potential future government.

Or just leave a comment and have your say. This could turn into a healthy and exciting political conversation (yay!)

Red Hat CEO: Open-source economics key to innovation

Lotte Nielsen — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:22:00 +0100

In a nutshell, the cost benefits of high-quality, free software came to outweigh the industry's former concerns about risks associated with "rebel code."

This trend, not visible in 2004, started with early adopters like Google. As Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst highlighted in his opening OSBC keynote speech Wednesday, Google couldn't exist, and certainly couldn't have adopted its current business model, but for open-source software.

Whitehurst backed this up by pointing to Google's planned 10 million servers. Adding up the roughly $2,000 in software costs per server (for the operating system, database, etc.) means that it would take roughly $20 billion for Google to run those 10 million servers with proprietary software.

Today, perhaps Google can afford that. When it started? Not a chance. In a world of traditional software economics, Google would not exist.

That's how open source enables the early adopters. It's why open source, not proprietary software, is driving cloud computing through companies like Northscale and Cloudera, but also through projects like Linux, which IBM sees at the heart of cloud computing.

But it's not necessarily about technology. To quote Whitehurst, "It is the economics of open source that are driving the development of the cloud." Microsoft can build great technology. It hasn't yet learned how to give it away, at least, not outside a narrow niche of its product line.

How will these economics apply to old-school industries like automotive?

Whitehurst pointed out that the typical car today has 100 million lines of source code, and Frost and Sullivan forecast that number to climb to 200 million to 300 million lines of code in the next few years.

If we're not careful, Whitehurst warns, electronics will become the bottleneck to innovation in things like cars:

We wouldn't feel comfortable servicing a car with the hood welded shut, and we shouldn't feel comfortable driving around 100 million lines of closed-source code. We are using 20th century development models for developing software that go into these products....

We are likely to see innovation slow significantly over the next decade if we don't adopt open-source development or open-source principles.

Given how fast the industry has moved toward open-source infrastructure as standard operating procedure, I suspect we'll see the open-source adoption that Whitehurst urges is critical to future innovation.

What we haven't yet seen, at least not consistently throughout the open-source world, is how to monetize open source. That question remains constant since 2004. While the survival of open source is no longer in doubt, the survival of some open-source business models very much is.

Here's a hint: the best "open-source companies" don't sell open source at all. From Google to Red Hat to Facebook to Oracle, such companies sell value around open source. That's the winning model. The trick is to figure out how to apply that principle to a particular business.

How the Google-Microsoft conflict could hit open source

Lotte Nielsen — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:05:00 +0100

That’s because Google has become the U.S. company most identified with open source development. Google’s Android phones are mainly made in China — like nearly all phones.

Google insists its pull-out won’t impact Android, but can we really be certain? Can Google really be certain?
Hassling HTC, quietly putting out the word to others not to support Android, could delay Google considerably. If China wanted it could tell its courts to encourage Apple to file suit there, saying it was only seeking to protect patent rights. It could tell Taiwan that Android is provocative.

The plain fact is that the open source ethos of trusting people and accepting diverse opinions in the code stream is directly at odds with China’s Internet policy, which insists on shifting boundaries moved at the whim of Beijing’s mandarins, and absolute adherence to those boundaries.

Anyone who thinks modern China is communist knows neither China nor communism. It’s an evolving amalgam of the mandarin, bureaucratic system that ruled under the emperors, and a centrally-controlled capitalism George Orwell wrote about in his journalism.

In America business is strong and government weak. In China it’s just the opposite. And the government process is an opaque tea party. (China was drinking tea when Sarah Palin’s ancestors (and Keith Olbermann’s) were living in caves.) Business has access to that tea party, but its interests are not controlling. Businesses are not people under Chinese law.

Right now China is going through an enormous internal struggle, similar to what this country was going through in 2007 and 2008. It’s looking for an economic soft landing while the economic ground comes up to meet it.

We own its bank. Its system of maintaining a strong yuan through purchases of U.S. government assets is a game that must end, somehow, which means growth must slow, which means dreams must be put off, which risks social unrest.
China fears disorder the way Germany does inflation.

Open source is a disordered state of software development, especially when contrasted with proprietary models. Individuals are free to see code, change code, and release code on their schedule, to their own specifications. To a Chinese bureaucrat’s eyes it must seem akin to anarchy. Someone might stick a Falun Gong fortune cookie in there.

We call it freedom. China calls it madness. China has grudgingly accepted Americans’ rights to do and think as Americans will, but it has not yet accepted the idea of its own people thinking and doing as they will. Boundaries must be maintained.

Proprietary software maintains boundaries. Proprietary development can be controlled. I can easily see China turning toward the proprietary model. Open source may be an innocent bystander in this great game, but innocent bystanders can be victims, too.

Will customers demand open clouds?

Lotte Nielsen — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:45:08 +0100

It is easy to tell if a device is open or closed. If you don’t know right away the media will tell you. The iPhone is closed. The Android is open. We can debate how open and how closed all day. That’s what journalists do.

But clouds? Right now the only really active business cloud is Amazon’s. You can make it pretty open. You can install Linux on it.

The idea of the cloud, however, was to make questions about open and closed irrelevant through virtualization. When it comes to the cloud, open includes the power to run closed.

IBM is big into clouds, more as a mainframe replacement than a service, and while its clouds grok open source, they still make a choice. They run Red Hat’s version of KVM virtualization. Dave Rosenberg says they will also support VMWare, but it’s clear that they align with Red Hat.

But is that all that matters? Matt Asay says whether your sync is open matters more than your cloud’s virtualization scheme. Cloud support for open sync systems like Funambol is what counts to him.

You start to see the problem. How can we demand an open cloud if we don’t know what open means? That’s why Microsoft can claim its cloud is open. Because it’s interoperable with open source. Microsoft has always defined open in terms of interoperability.

We have come a long way from last year’s debate over an Open Cloud Manifesto. We have come a long way in terms of the market. We have traveled less distance in terms of the debate.

Until open source advocates agree on what open means in terms of the cloud, clouds will evolve in ways that give lip service to open as an ideal, but still enforce vendor lock-in.

So what makes a cloud open to you?

Open Logic auditing open source for sale

Lotte Nielsen — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:18:37 +0100

The service will not only detail what open source your company depends upon, but what licenses you’re using. This can help an acquirer set an appropriate price.

In making its announcement, Open Logic quoted a recent study saying $36 billion in technology acquisitions went down last year, and 85% of those deals were done in the second half of the year. With the markets now opening wider, more deals are expected.

The technical means for the new product is Open Logic’s Deep Discovery product, previously pitched mainly for audit and census work.

Open Logic may be best known to those in the open source community for its support of the Open Source Census, which collected data on 433,640 installations, finding Ubuntu to be the dominant Linux distribution and Firefox the dominant application.

Open Logic auditing open source for sale

Lotte Nielsen — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:15:32 +0100

Mozilla is best known for its Firefox browser. Call it one small step by a licensor, one giant leap against license proliferation. The most important result may be to make it easy for Google Code contributions to move into the browser. Google is a big supporter of the Apache license.

The Black Duck Knowledge Center currently lists Mozilla as the 10th most popular open source license with 1.22% of the market. Apache is 7th with 4.01%. The three main GPL licenses — GPL V.2, LGPL, and GPL V. 3 — together represent more than 60% of the license market.

Apache has momentum, however. Matt Asay called it better for open source businesses last year — he’s now COO of Ubuntu, which uses the GPL. Bruce Perens has written that only three licenses are really necessary — a “gift” license, a “sharing with rules” license, and a hybrid between the two.

Most open source license proliferation involves the rules under which sharing takes place. The OSI’s License Proliferation Committee says there are dozens of OSI-approved licenses out there but only nine (including Apache and Mozilla) have what it calls “strong communities” around them.

License proliferation is a big issue among big companies, since some licenses have terms that contradict one another, forcing corporate projects to be built with multi-license distributions that can be confusing.

Version 1.0 of the Mozilla Public License was written by Mitchell Baker when she was a lawyer for Netscape. The current version, 1.1, was written by the Mozilla Foundation and is a hybrid of BSD and GPL terms.

The new license, Mozilla Public License V.2, is expected to be out by the end of the year.

'Cloud' vs. 'source' in the battle of bland corporate names

Lotte Nielsen — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:46:23 +0100

And even when we do come up with somewhat creative names, like Google, they're a mistake.

So perhaps it's not surprising that two of the biggest trends in computing--open-source software and cloud computing--have been accompanied by some of the most staid company naming conventions ever.

For open source, it became de rigueur to include the name "source" in the company name, as a way to signal that the company was the source of the open-source project in question, and hence the "bank" to which would-be customers should be making a deposit. (The other reason, as open-source veteran Larry Augustin often points out, is that combining the company name and project name makes branding much easier.)

And so the open-source companies wore "source" proudly on their sleeves: XenSource, MuleSource, SpringSource, SpikeSource, SourceSense, Sourcefire, and more.

It's a telling shift in the market, however, that open-source companies don't seem to be appending their corporate names with "source" anymore as open source goes mainstream. Instead, it's the cloud-computing companies that are eager to tack a "cloud" badge to their name, as a selection of companies presenting at the upcoming Under the Radar conference show:

This isn't to say that the unoriginal names equate to bad companies. As in open source, several of these companies will likely turn out to be significant winners in the market.

What they won't get kudos for, however, is in breaking new ground in marketing.

Microsoft readies open-source analytics framework for Silverlight

Lotte Nielsen — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:44:38 +0100

Michael Scherotter, a Microsoft Media Experience Evangelist, is slated to share more about the framework at Microsoft’s Mix 10 Web conference in Las Vegas next week.

The framework is designed to allow developers to integrate Web analytics into Silverlight applications. It will be able to track out-of-browser and offline applications, as well as support multiple analytics services from various third-party vendors, according to information on Microsoft’s Mix Web site. Scherotter provided a few more details about the Silverlight Analytics Framework on his blog this week.

“The process over these past seven months has been to reach out to as many of the analytics vendors and control vendors as we could and build an inclusive framework that supports all different types of analytics that are relevant to application designers and developers,” Scherotter blogged.

The new framework will support designers using Microsoft’s Expression Blend tool to build applications without coding, Scherotter said. It also will work with Microsoft’s SketchFlow tool and the Silverlight Media Framework.

Today, analytics for measuring the performance of a rich Internet app is often done after the fact, done incompletely or even not done at all. “Current ways to instrument applications are cumbersome, are focusing on instrumentation of Web pages and sometimes not appropriate to next generation interactive connected applications,” Microsoft officials said in a March 11 post on the Silverlight Team blog. The new open-source framework will allow developers to “instrument” their applications in a deeper and easier way, officials blogged.

Mix 10 will be a showcase for Silverlight, especially Silverlight 4, which is due to ship in the first half of 2010. Silverlight is one of the keys to Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 developer pitch, which company officials also are slated to discuss at next week’s conference.

What Apple's and Microsoft's patent threats mean for start-ups

Lotte Nielsen — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:45:50 +0100

But that's not the lesson I learn from Schwartz's commentary.

Instead, what is immediately obvious to me is that a) the technology industry is a morass of conflicting patent claims, b) since there's really no way to completely avoid others' patents the best defense is to have a hefty counterbalancing patent portfolio of one's own, and c) thus, only big companies can truly compete in a trigger-happy, patent-wielding marketplace.

Guess what? This rules out virtually all new entrants to a market, including companies like Facebook that not-so-long-ago were start-ups. But it may fall particularly hard on open-source projects and companies, which typically eschew patents.

When Apple came calling to threaten Sun with a user-interface design patent lawsuit, and when Microsoft asked to smoke the peace pipe over OpenOffice (at the "small" price of a royalty on every copy of OpenOffice downloaded, as Schwartz read it), Sun had a compelling response: it's possible that we violate your patents, but have you looked into your own trampling on Sun's IP?

It's a good argument, if a depressing one. Depressing, because it's the kind of argument that only big companies can make since often they're the ones with more patents than sense.

The Open Invention Network and other patent collectives have sought to level the playing field by buying up patents to be held for the defense of their members, and they offer a good start. But it's just a start, and it costs quite a bit to participate fully with them. (This makes sense, given how much money such collectives must spend to buy the patents in the first place.)

Whatever the cost, this may be the only refuge for start-ups and others, like Red Hat, that don't have an aggressive patent-acquisition policy.

As I said, the technology industry is a quagmire of conflicting patent claims. For example, it's as certain that Microsoft violates Linux-related patents as it is that Linux violates Microsoft patents. The industry is simply too messy for it to be otherwise.

We need better, more comprehensive ways for smaller companies to be able to compete in this market without the fear of running afoul of some big company's patent portfolio. It's great that companies like IBM have been pledging patents for the protection of its preferred open-source projects (like Linux), but we need more than charity in order to offer start-ups--open source or otherwise--"Sun-like" protection from the patent extortion racket.

At some point, the interests of open source-friendly IBM or Oracle will conflict with a start-up or project, just as has happened with Microsoft, and then big brother the protector will become Big Brother the tormentor.

Perhaps it's time we focus our collective efforts on a single patent collective like Open Invention Network, an organization that becomes the equal of a Microsoft in a patent feud? As in the insurance industry, the premium should come down as more participants join in.

Other ideas?

Why Google Android is winning

Lotte Nielsen — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:43:37 +0100

But new ComScore data on the U.S. smartphone market suggest that both should be worried by what they see in their rear-view mirrors:

While Android still claims only 7.1 percent of the U.S. smartphone market, "objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear." This certainly seems to be the case with Google, which added 4.3 percentage points of market share in just four months. And while Android's user base may skew "young, male, and cheap," such increase implies a much wider audience.

(Credit: ComScore)

That is astonishing growth and has much to do with Google's open-source approach.

As ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn remarks, "Just as the Internet takes friction out of the distribution and development process, open source for Google removes friction from the business process." In Android land, this means making it easy for device manufacturers and wireless telecoms to evaluate, develop on, and ship Android-based devices.

And ship them they are, to the tune of 60,000 Android devices per day.

As Wired noted after the recent Mobile World Congress:

This year at the Mobile World Congress is the year of Android. Google's operating system debuted here two years ago....This year, Android is everywhere, on handsets from HTC, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and even Garmin-Asus. If this were the world of computers, Android would be in a similar position to Windows: Pretty much every manufacturer puts it on its machines.

There is one key distinction, though: Android is open source. It makes all the difference.

Apple's approach is the exact inverse of Google's, right down to its developer contracts. Apple owns (and tightly controls) the complete iPhone stack, from hardware to software, and also exerts tremendous control over its distribution channels, which makes for a super-slick experience, but also constrains Apple's success to whatever it, as a company, can scale to deliver.

Apple has sought to alleviate this bottleneck through its App Store, which offers unrivaled access to third-party applications, but Google is improving its own application store and arguably already has critical mass sufficient to appease most users' application requirements.

Importantly, Google is assembling a community of telecoms and handset manufacturers locked out of the iPhone game. Apple offers an exceptional experience, but the iPhone creates far more enemies than friends with its closed approach--enemies who are congregating on the Android bandwagon.

The downside to Google's open-source approach, of course, is coordination, or lack thereof. People have rightly raised questions about Android's fragmentation--(fears that Glyn Moody believes can be put to rest). And while Apple gets top marks for its customer support, Google's support for its own Android-based Nexus One has been less than ideal.

Indeed, for all the appeal Google's break-the-mold approach to selling and supporting Android-based phones may have for some, it's likely that many aren't ready for such an open approach. Apple's closed approach is a very comfortable one for consumers.

Even so, as Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capobianco writes, "Open source in mobile is inevitable." It's inevitable precisely because the market is so fragmented. Open source offers a way for device manufacturers to collaborate on common infrastructure like Android and the WebKit browser (which even RIM is now recognizing).

And it's inevitable because mobile revenue models have never been about selling bits, but rather about providing services. This makes it easy for companies like Google to contribute heavily to mobile open-source efforts and still get paid.

In the enterprise, open source is often simply a more convenient way to distribute software. In mobile, it's more a matter of development: open, pooled development. This is as open source was meant to be. Google gets this, and that's why its Android platform is gaining ground so quickly on closed-source rivals.

Open source first, ask questions later

Lotte Nielsen — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:04:52 +0100

ReMail was more efficient in terms of system resources than Apple’s own mail.app, it offered full text searching, and it had other neat features, like autocomplete.

Founder Gabor Cselle now lists himself as just a software engineer at Google, the rest of the development team has also scattered, and Apple has taken ReMail off its app store.

What’s going on? Well, it’s not a bug it’s a feature.

For Google, open source simplifies vendor relationships. You can join the Google software ecosystem without signing a contract. You can exploit Google projects like Android and ReMail and profit from them, because they’re under an Apache license.
Just as the Internet takes friction out of the distribution and development process, open source for Google removes friction from the business process.

Why did this not happen before? One reason is you leave a lot of “money on the floor” by doing this. The other reason, of course, is that Google can afford it.

As I have written here many times, Google’s advantage lies in its infrastructure. It is the low-cost producer of full Internet infrastructure. This includes more than bandwidth. It includes all the tools and hosting needed to deliver Internet transactions.
This advantage can be exploited against any rival. In this case it is being exploited against Apple.
Until someone is willing to try and match this advantage, and even the phone companies seem for now unwilling to even try, Google will exploit this advantage against all comers.

These advantages lean in favor of anyone with ideas, but they also put a limit on the degree to which you can profit from those ideas. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lone programmer in your pajamas or Steve Jobs — Google’s advantages both enable you to bring your ideas to market and squeeze your potential profits like the view of buildings you see on Google Earth.

It’s easy for Google not to be evil in such an atmosphere. There is no one for it to be evil to.

But it does make open source start to feel a bit like Orwell’s Animal Farm. All pigs are equal, but some are more equal than others.

SpringSource launches lightweight tc server for virtual, cloud environments

Lotte Nielsen — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:02:55 +0100

The tc Server Spring Edition, which will be available as part of the 2.0 product line in April, gives customers a small footprint that is “ideally suited” for virtual server environments as well as public and private clouds. VMware said it is heeding the call of customers who maintain that deploying Java applications properly in virtualized environments requires a lean architecture.

The server is also designed to make it easier for customers running Spring applicatiions on Java -based enteprise servers to migrate to the Spring edition and for customers running applications on Tomcat servers to move to the more enterprise ready tc Server Sring edition, the company added.

As part of the rollout, VMware, has also announced a special promotion cutely dubbed “Spring on VMware” that offers two licenses of the Spring edition free and 60 days of evaluation support free for a limited time with the sale of select VMware products through VMware channel partners. The promotion runs between March 8 and May 8th.

The Spring edition SpringSource tc server 2.0 will start at $750 per CPU while the standard edition is priced at $500 per processor and the developers edition will be free.

The 2.0 platform also offers deeper visibility into Spring applications, an enhanced tool suite to speed code development and find performance flaws and a template-driven tool for configuring and deploying multiple application server instance per machine, VMware said.
It is also integrated with VMware Workstation and VMware Lab Manager, which allows for applications to be quickly debugged and deployed in virtualized environments.

VMWare featured in its release today a quote given by a portal webmaster for NPC International who said he was able to deploy dozens of application instances on one server virtualized by VMware and said he could not have deployed his web based applications into the private cloud he built without tc’s small footprint.

Will Apple be the next SCO or the next Microsoft?

Lotte Nielsen — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:42:09 +0100

The answer depends on how hard Apple presses its case.

You can get a clue by looking at who Apple has sued. While the suit is actually about the Android operating system Google sponsors, the company has been careful to only go after one of its OEMs, a Taiwanese one at that.

That’s a strike-at-the-weak strategy. You get the best deal you can with a weak player and then use that against the strong. The emphasis here is on the word weak.

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.