Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian, ("ill considered" - Redmonk),
not content with the murkiness of his own company's patent arrangements
with Microsoft (the two companies laughably "agreed to disagree"
on
whether or not their November
2006 agreement was an ackowledgement that Novell was infringing
Microsoft patents), has decided to throw some mud in the general
direction of OpenSolaris.
"Rather than focusing
on Microsoft, Zemlin pointed Hovsepian to Sun and Open Solaris, where
his comments were unusually pointed.
"I believe OpenSolaris has had about 60,000 downloads last time I
looked," he said. "When you look at Linux downloads just last year
[there were] over two million of just SUSE.” Hovsepian also attacked
the OpenSolaris license directly.
"I would suggest to the customers and to the community, be careful. The
way they’ve written their contract as soon as you look at it, you can’t
go back and look at Linux.
"It’s a very dangerous contract from my perspective for someone who
wants to work on Linux."
Attacking the license? Well, any old fule knows that only GPL'd
code is compatible with GPL'd code. But presumably, Mr Hovsepian
is scaremongering that those who work with OpenSolaris code have been
exposed to patented methods and may face encumbrances if they want to
put back to another code base. Is that what he's getting
at? (Incidentally, his criticism remind me more of Microsoft's
covenant not
to sue open source developers who use Microsoft-patented methods for
"non-commercial" use than anything else. Now that's dangerous.)
Anyway, last time I checked, Sun is pretty clear on software
patent policy. You can read about it from Mike
Dillon (General Counsel), Simon
Phipps and again here
(Chief Open Source Officer and, ahem, my boss), Greg
Papadopoulos (CTO) and Jonathan
Schwartz and again here
(CEO).
Secondly, Ron Hovsepian's reported figure on OpenSolaris downloads
wasn't too clear. Did he mean source code? Or binary
distributions? When did he last check? And who did he check
with? Of course, since Sun opened the Solaris source code, there
have been millions of downloads of Solaris 10, hundreds of thousands
(if not millions) of downloads of Solaris Express, and I don't know how
many downloads of source code, but I would put it in the tens or
hundreds of thousands (I tried to calculate this, but gave up - you
have the full tarball, and specific consolidations...hits per file, data transferred per file...it gets
messy and I couldn't generate a figure I could stand behind). We've also had tens of thousands of downloads of the
developer preview of the binary distribution coming out later in the
year. Which isn't bad for an operating system that hasn't been
launched yet.
Ron, left, not right
But enough about us. Last
time I checked, Microsoft's intepretation of Novell's patent licensing
agreement was,
"If a customer says, 'Look, do we have liability for the
use of your
patented work?' Essentially, If you're using non-SUSE Linux, then I'd
say the answer is yes," -Steve Ballmer. More on this in the latest episode of the Register's Open
Season podcast (27:20 minutes in) -this is not necessarily
historical issue.
Now this isn't Mr Hovsepian's first ill-informed
and misleading attack on OpenSolaris, but I don't think that's it's
really our fault. Simply put, he has a shortage of targets.
I mean, who else is he going to attack? Given his position, he can't very well attack
another Linux distro, and he's hardly going to attack Microsoft.
Apple? For successfully porting of OpenSolaris technology into
their operating system (without licensing any patents, we might point
out)? Doesn't really work, does it?
Open source needs better leadership that this.
ps. the views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer
Make sure you don't miss the insight of industry insider John Dvorak's coverage of the Sun-MySQL deal. He isn't falling for the clueless mainstream line that this deal actually makes any sense for the parties involved. Uh-uh.
So what if
"Sun has busted right into the vibrant gut of the Linux market by grabbing the M. Red Hat can sit on the box. Sun will go ahead and own your data layer though, thank you very much."
So what if
"In addition, Sun gets the attention of thousands of developers, including many of those P[Perl, php, Python] folks."
"This deal stinks from top to bottom", explains Mr Dvorak. "I'm close to being convinced that Oracle wanted to buy MySQL to kill the product, but knew that it couldn't pull off the stunt itself. It would be too obvious, especially to European Union regulators. So it sent in a stooge to do the job."
This isn't any old embarrassing pile of speculation hastily cobbled together by a self-promoting hack who needs a contrary opinion to maintain his profile. Mr Dvorak's track record on explaining the ins-and-outs of Silicon Valley is second to none. What's the secret being Google's great success?
"Working both harder and smarter...That's all there is to it; the rest is smoke and mirrors."
Ah, but if it's really so simple, how come no one else is doing what Google is doing? Mr Dvorak saw that one coming:
"Right now, nobody wants to do that."
Now you know.
So, why is the deal taking place at all? Regular Dvorak readers will know all about that: it's the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act. The high cost of regulation is forcing companies to remain private and therefore they become attractive acquisition targets. And the charming Mr Dvorak is the man to expose this fact for two reasons. He's brave and he's certainly not overpaid:
I'm not sure if the reticence to openly carp is because of [the executive class'] generally inflated salaries that would make them look like whining divas or if it is a simple lack of courage. Probably both.
Mr Dvorak's inescapable conclusion: if you want to eliminate deals that "stink", regulate less.
Any sceptics who still might think that this deal will work out well for Sun, for MySQL and for MySQL customers and MySQL users will have the last vestiges of doubt blown away by the knowledge that the price Sun paid for MySQL was especially unfair, being simultaneously too high:
"Sun cannot actually afford to spend a $1 billion on a company producing a mere $60 million in revenue and working outside its core competencies."
and too low:
"and there should have been a publicized bidding war resulting in a much higher price than $1 billion."
Any student of economics knows that pricing imperfections result from a lack of information. So, who's to blame? The diplomatic Mr Dvorak reluctantly points out,
"Part of this silence stems directly from the fact that MySQL is a Swedish company, and heaven forbid the Swedes announce their intentions or do anything that would appear flamboyant or be interpreted as (gasp) bragging! "
A traditional Swedish lack of flamboyance
Swedes don't brag, see. Although this may come as news to Norwegians and Danes who recently learned that Stockholm anointed itself "capital of Scandinavia". For all that, Mr Dvorak is correct. Swedes don't boast. So as a non-Swede living here, let me note, that Sweden has been rated as
Another piece of Mr Dvorak's that caught my eye was this one about media consolidation on the internet:
"The only papers or news organizations that can expect to survive will be those with lots of original content available only at their individual sites."
Well, with content this original, I'm sure we can expect to enjoy Mr Dvorak's writing on Marketwatch for a long time to come.
ps. the views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer
So, England will not be competing in next summer's European Championships. Frankly, I'm glad. I enjoy watching football, but not England. It isn't the inability of multi-millionaires to play a simple game in a coherent manner that puts me off, irritating as it is. It's the behaviour of the people that watch.
When people watch the club they support, they do just that: support. As a rule, they are predisposed to be nice to their own players and with an expectation that supporters of the other team will be equally partisan. But when people demonstrate their "passion" for the national team, it's far too frequently with an abusive tone, with the indignation of unmet and unrealistic expectations, and with a lack of basic decency that other countries' supporters are able to show.
Here in Sweden, most gardens have a flagpole from which the Swedish flag flies on special occasions. In England, if someone flies the cross of St George in their garden, it tends to mark them out as strange. We have difficulty expressing our nationality. Is it because we're ashamed of it, or secretly too proud, or so self aware as to be both? I'm not sure. But when the England team plays, the expression of national identity is nothing other than boorish and offensive, witness the routine booing of other countries' national anthems.
Much navel-gazing and public thought will be given to how to get these lavishly rewarded footballers to perform at something approaching the level their status would imply. But I think there's a more pressing issue: where do these polyester-clad outpourings of chauvinism and anger come from, and how can we make them stop?
ps. the views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer.
So is standardisation a game or a process? I ask this after reading Jason Matusow's staggering act of disingenuity about Microsoft's apparent offering of incentives and ready-formed opinions to partners (mostly Swedish IT resellers) for them to join the Swedish Standards Institute (SIS) and vote in favour of accepting Microsoft's not uncontroversial Office Open XML specification*.
After Computer Sweden broke this news, Microsoft helpfully clarified that they didn't actually do anything wrong because they, er, realised what they were doing was wrong. And so 18 Microsoft Gold Partners joined SIS and voted to approve Microsoft Open Office XML last Monday, in spite of these incentives being retracted. Mr Matusow says that incentives were only offered to two partners in the first place, the quote in Computer Sweden said it was "a few" (”ett fåtal”).
infinitives, hairs...whatever
Mr Matusow wants to be clear - the incentives were retracted, and any other lobbying was not actually against any rules, and therefore fair game:
"It is critical to note that the addition of voting members at that time was completely within the rules of the national standards body.
...While there are many arguments to be had over the relative merits of this rule…it is a rule nonetheless.
...The process and vote at SIS were not affected."
Well, we do rather have to take his word for it, but either way, it would be only be "critical" if all you are actually interested in is the formal approval of a respected international standards body - or "playing to win". If you were seeking to make a good standard (i.e. submitting to the process), wouldn't it be critical to note that the 6 months of work that SIS delegates did examining the specification will not now see the light of day because of addition of so many parties to the vote at the very last moment?
ps. the views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer
I saw an interview with a branding consultant discussing the unloved London Olympics logo recently.
He laughably claimed that the question is not, "Do I like the logo?", but rather, "Is it suggestive of an innovative experience?". He said that it met this criteria. It communicates a great deal. His bizarre conclusion was that being unusual and ostensibly unattractive does not a bad logo make. Unsurprisingly, this freak was lambasted as a pseud in Private Eye.
Of course, he was totally right. London's ugly Olympic logo is memorable, distinctive and speaks of an organisation which is thinking differently. It is an unusual, unattractive and a *good* logo.
My wife, (who is a marketing manager) once observed that marketing (and especially branding) is the one discipline which everyone believes they can do better than the department charged with doing it. Marketing is not, as they say, rocket science. Equally, it isn't entirely intuitive. And so I observe that much of the discussion about the Sun changing its trading symbol from SUNW to JAVA fails to engage with the reasons behind the decision.
My perspective? Around 2004, Steven Milunovich, a Merrill Lynch analyst, wrote a very report on Sun, in which he labelled the company's technology "irrelevant". I was astonished to see how influential this was. A very old friend of mine (actually, my oldest) works in the City of London, while knowing little of Sun's technology, quoted this one adjective back to me in his assessment of Sun's prospects.
Happily, Merrill Lynch seem a little less gloomy about Sun these days. But what of my friend? Well, he owns a "convergence device" and he uses the internet. He's a lot less likely to accept that a stock is "irrelevant" if he closely associates it with a technology platform that he is using several times a day. And perceptions do, it seems, count.
I'm cross-posting this, having written it on the Guardian's (rather good) football blog as RightOnBrother.
Listening the Guardian's also rather good Football Weekly podcast (which is incidentally now bi-weekly), one of the senior journalists, Sean Ingle, spoke of the "inevitability" of the use of instant replay evidence in football. Calling it a "no brainer", and saying that he does not understand opposition to to the idea. This, of course, in the wake of Liverpool's 1-1 draw with Chelsea which saw referee Rob Styles awarded a bizarre penalty to Chelsea.
I'm a staunch opponent of the introduction of video replays into football. A good example of just why was last October Great Britain played New Zealand in a rugby league international. Almost all of the tries were referred to the video ref. This is by no means uncommon. The option of the video umpire undermines the authority of the referee, who will be castigated for failing to use it. So, almost every try is referred to the video referee.
Not that the video referee is infallible: watch again that rugby league international to see that on a majority of occasions two veteran commentators (Jonathan Davies and Ray French, are both former players, one with refereeing experience) disagree with the decision of the 4th official.
You're the video ref. Goal or no goal?
What's more, the experience of a live football match would be diminished by the instant replay. It is not simply that lengthy pauses in the action would slow the game down, but that the very defining moment of a game - a score - is nullified. Seeing "Goal", or "No goal" eventually appear on a video screen is a very poor second to seeing the net bulge, or a finger-tip save.
And if the effect of a goal is cathartic for the spectators, it is doubly so for the players. Having to pause for a matter of several minutes before a goal is given will reduce the shifts in confidence and momentum which see games change hands. Would Liverpool's famous 6-minute assault on AC Milan in 2005 have been possible with a video umpire present? Lengthy breaks in play are what defending teams crave to kill revivals off.
I don't blame Sean Ingle for considering this to be a "no-brainer". I was ambivalent about video referring until it totally ruined my enjoyment of rugby league, a sport with discrete passages of play. Football, with its contiguous play, lends itself even less to video refereeing. How far back in a passage of play would one go in determining whether a goal was legitimate? Or would only certain laws be enforced by technology? Wouldn't any line be arbitrary, and just as unsatisfactory?
Anyone who thinks that it is inevitable that we should have instant replays should consider just how rubbish video refereeing actually would be. Television is important enough already, and, as Liverpool have proved so well in their first two games of the season, these things do even themselves out: Liverpool beat Aston Villa the weekend before by scoring from a highly dubious free kick.
p.s. the views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer
Self-styled Cyber Cynic Steven J Vaughan-Nichols published this piece suggesting that recent developments in the IBM-SCO case may compromise the OpenSolaris project.
To be clear, I think that people like Steven J Vaughan-Nichols do an important job. There are times when self-conscious cynicism should be one's guiding light (as anyone who has recently wasted three hours of their weekend trying to get rid of a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesperson can tell you). Moreover, I can't comment upon the legal merits of his argument, being under-qualified (i.e. not qualified at all), not authorised and generally lacking the requisite ambition. But I can comment on the article itself.
As I read this, Mr J Vaughan-Nichols seems to be implying that Sun believes it bought the rights necessary to open source Solaris from SCO.
However, clicking on the link he provides that quotes Jonathan Schwartz, one quickly realises that Mr Schwartz appears to assert rights equivalent to ownership to Unix based upon Sun's agreement with AT&T in 1992. Which is not the impression I got from Mr Vaughan-Nichols' piece. With that in mind, the article may, perhaps, seem rather less Slashdottable.
ps. the views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer
Disparaging? Possibly. Disingenuous? Never in a million years.
Linux kernel maintainer Andrew Morton, reports ZDNet, was rather dismissive of OpenSolaris at LinuxWorld yesterday, inviting all to rally behind the cause of, er, monocultures.
Well, we don't expect Mr Morton to trumpet the great advances that OpenSolaris has made (which, not unreasonably, many in the GNU/Linux community are unaware of), and indeed, leading figures in the Linux community have in the past made even gloomier prognostications for Solaris.
But Mr Morton is right on the money (in the parlance of our times) with this comment:
It’s a great shame that OpenSolaris still exists...They should have killed it...They've fragmented the non-Windows operating system world and they continue to do so
Quite right. And let it not end there. Surely Sun might be further castigated for the UltraSPARC T2, which is continuing to fragment the non-Intel processor world. And it's a great shame that the Opera browser still exists, for they are continuing to fragment the non-Internet Explorer world. And let us not forget Gmail, which has fragmented the non-Hotmail world. And I really think it's time that O'Reilly pulled the plug on OSCON, fracturing, as it is, the non-LinuxWorld world.
Mr Morton also goes on to say that SystemTap will eventually have all the capabilities of DTrace. For reasons why that may not prove to be the case, you can have a look at Adam Leventhal's recent postings here and here.
ps. the views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer
There are three anniversaries I'll be celebrating this week. First, it's 10 years since I joined Sun. My first job? Cold-calling customers who had stopped calling Sun. Yes, I was a tele-marketeer, and I can tell you, it is tough and thankless work. And so, whenever I get a tele-marketeer on the line at home, I try to be as sympathetic as posible while I tell them to get stuffed. Anyway, that was 1997 and I had just arrived in the Netherlands. I was looking for work and grateful for the opportunity, just as I'm grateful now that I could transfer with my family over to Sweden.
The second anniversary this week? OpenSolaris. It's 2 years today since it was launched on a suspecting public. As a user, I think the experience of an OpenSolaris distribution on the desktop is coming on in leaps and bounds. And although I don't want to dwell on the negative, I was pleased to hear Linus Torvalds talk about OpenSolaris this week, even if I don't especially like, or agree with everything he says. I think that contrasting his comments this week with those from February 2005 shows the relevance and success of OpenSolaris.
Which brings me to my third anniversary: on the 21st, our daughter Emma turns one. There is a concept in philosophy called "qualia", such as yellowness, or the taste of coffee, the properties of the senses which seem irreducible and can only be described by themselves. I'd say that being a parent is similar: the feeling of parenthood can only be described, I am sure, by being a parent. I don't think that you know love, or fear, until you have a child.
ps. the views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer
Italians don't beat you, you lose to them.
- Johan Cruijff
So, just the
then.
It is not often you see the better team on the night lose one of those games, but that was the case last night, as it was in 2005. I can't compare Milan's achievement last night to Liverpool's triumph of the imagination two years ago, but good luck to Milan, if you win it fair and square you deserve it.
I wrote with no little fantasy back in February that it would be wonderful for the city of Liverpool to be home to both European capital of culture and European football champions in 2008. The capital of culture project is moving ahead and the city is clearly energised by it all ("culture of captial" my dad calls it, in reference to the giant and superfluous shopping centre being built in the centre of Liverpool). And tonight, incredibly, Liverpool face AC Milan in the final of the Champions League -a rematch of the greatest game of recent years: the 2005 final.
It isn't just the fact of it being a rematch that I find romantic about the occasion. It was the AC Milan team of the late 1980s that really made it clear that Liverpool (at the time excluded from European competition after the terrible events of Brussels in 1985) no longer had a claim to be the world's best team. I can still remember the radio commentator, the night Milan beat Steaua Bucharest 4-0 to win the 1989 European title, saying, "Let's face it, not even Liverpool could have lived with AC Milan tonight".
Well, let's hope that they can this night. See you in the morning.
ps. the views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer, who may be cheering for Milan.
It is with regret that I read Sam Varghese's critical report of Sun
this week, Solaris
can never be Linux. This wasn't just any old nonsense from a
blogger posing as a jornalist after all, but the man, the Varg.
Is there a better writer out there?
Nexenta shows how successful Solaris with GNU tool...s can be. If Ian's Indiana project is similar, the prospects of success look good. Solaris has a heritage of compatibility with various flavors of tools, and this GNUification just continues this proud history. As a software developer I don't much care which kernel sits under the hood so long as "top", "ps", "ls", "pwd", etc, all work like normal and I can ship my code out of the door working.
Like many, I was tremendously excited to try the new Ubuntu release, Feisty Faun (7.04). So excited, perhaps, that I may have cut the usual corners, like backing up critical data on my laptop. Well, one gets so blase, doesn't one? The machine (an Acer Ferrari 4006) has Win XP on one partition, Ubuntu Dapper on the second and Solaris Express Developer Edition on the third.
Anyway, this morning I bravely plunged in with my freshly burned copy of Feisty, and hit the wall imemdiately. And this, really, is my error. So used have I become to Ubuntu practically installing itself that I was surprised that I actually needed to read instructions during the process. Unbelievable. After 20 minutes of swearing and repeatedly trying the same, failed operation, I read the instructions and actually specified my root partition as requested...and the rest was as easy as ever.
What I had not realised, however, was that the GRUB boot loader that a GNU/Linux OS installs does not work with Solaris. Naively, I had just expected to edit the GRUB menu from Ubuntu and bobs-your-uncle, triple boot again, as I have done so many times from the GRUB menu in Solaris. Not so. What I understand, having spent a thoroughly objectionable hour this morning (and naturally, entering into the same spirit myself) is that Linux's GRUB won't recognise the Solaris file system, which judging by the error messages I have researching (can one say regoogling?) this morning, adds up.
Anyway, I'm happy to say, docs.sun.com came to the my rescue. If, like me, you upgrade a Linux partition on a machine with a Solaris partition, and, like me, you're an idiot, here is what I recommend you do:
0. (Because I forgot to) Write down the GRUB entry for your Linux image
1. Boot one of the OpenSolaris live CD distos (Belenix works very well)
2. Mount your Solaris root partition
3. Reinstall your original GRUB using /sbin/installgrub
4. Reboot into your Solaris environment and add the Linux entries to GRUB
Really, I was quite surprised that Ubuntu's GRUB doesn't support Solaris filesystems. Apparently the fix has been submitted to the GRUB project and will be integrated eventually...
Anyway, someone once said, experience is knowledge, everything else is merely information.
So, Feisty's up, and it's very impressive. It is fantastic to be able to apt-get Java packages, it's full of nice surprises (and naturally, one or two disappointments), and generally feels very polished indeed. I do, however, rate the chances of getting my Broadcom wireless card up on a ndiswrapper or getting Beryl up on my ATI card as slim-to-narrow, at least, not before bedtime.
ps. the views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer
pps. if anyone manages a more cack-handed install than that, please do let me know
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