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Is it me, or is this wishy-washy disease spreading?
BEA embraces and disses open source at the same time
BEA likes open source
BEA Systems’ planned next-generation application platform, called Project Genesis, will feature an open source component and accommodate scripting languages such as Ruby and Perl, BEA officials said at the BEAWorld San Francisco conference on Tuesday.
BEA hates open source
“I think open source for open source’s sake has been useless,” Chuang said.
“Some companies have taken multimillion lines of operating system code and open-sourced it,” he said, critically. Although sometime-BEA rival Sun Microsystems did this with its Solaris OS, Chuang said his comment was not specifically targeted at Sun. Others have done this as well, he said.
We’ve spent a lot of time here talking about companies who don’t get it. Here’s a few who do. This week, InfoWorld gave out “people who get it” awards: the Bossies.
Selected by InfoWorld Test Center editors and reviewers, these first annual Bossies celebrate the best open source software available for the enterprise. From CRM and ERP to OSes and middleware to networking, storage, and security software, our 36 winners prove that if your business is willing and your IT staff is ready, there’s an open source solution that’s able.
Last week journalists converged on Sun Microsystems’ Silicon Valley campus for its first Asia-Pacific summit. Jonathan Schwartz talked about the company’s roadmap and the role of open source:
During the Q&A session at the summit, I asked if that makes open source simply a marketing and branding exercise, rather than a key part of Sun’s technology roadmap–to which Schwartz retorted: “What’s the difference?”
…
The problem, however, arises when some companies choose to focus their attention on the marketing component and, in the case of open source, neglect to contribute their share of technology development back to the community.
By the end of that article, I was reminded of a post from Matt Asay yesterday about a much smaller company, Zipidy, which makes an open source mobile solution for finding parking. Zipidy is a big fan of using open source to build their product. They use Leap JADE (an open source Java framework), JBoss, and MySQL. The CEO, Cosimo Sperais, said of the choice:
The major principle that drives our use of open source is speed. Things in open source happen faster and sooner than in proprietary software.
…
If you are doing cutting-edge technology, you will often find that no products - open source or proprietary - meet your needs 100%. But the difference is that with open source you can extend the product to fit your needs. In a proprietary world, you’re stuck with the vendor’s product, as well as its priorities and roadmap.
But Zipidy itself is not open source. To that, Sperais answers, “We’d like to gain market share before we further consider open sourcing our own technology.”
The open source community pays attention when you take without giving back. As Bob Walters, CEO of Untangle, put it in interview earlier this summer, if you’re going to talk the open source talk, you’ve also got to walk the open source walk.
Microsoft accused of ballot stuffing in standards vote
Swedish internet pioneer Patrik Falstrom has accused Microsoft of bussing in local partners to a Swedish Standards Institute (SIS) meeting on OSI ratification of OOXML. The specification is already used by Microsoft in Office 2003, 2007 and XP.
The partners had not participated in the SIS’s earlier OOXML discussions but paid their admission fee and gave OOXML a resounding 25 “yes” votes compared to six “no” votes and three abstentions. It was believed OOXML was heading to a certain defeat had Microsoft’s supporters not turned out en masse.
To be able to vote all you need is to pay the membership fee to SIS and the total cost for this was 17.000 SEK (2444 USD). Of the 23 new companies that showed up this last minute and where the majority hasn’t shown any earlier interest, only Google has a clear agenda regarding OOXML and they are against it.
Jonas Bosson who participated in today’s meeting on behalf on FFII said that he left the meeting in protest and so did also IBM’s Swedish local representative Johan Westman.
Some XP and Vista users were sent into “Reduced Functionality Mode” over the weekend when Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) servers failed. WGA is Microsoft’s anti-piracy tool that forces users to validate their copies of Windows in order to receive updates. Earlier this year, ArsTechnica reported on WGA’s high rate of false positives.
Microsoft’s answer to its users after this failure? Oops. Try again in three days. (In reality, it was fixed within 12-19 hours, depending on whose report you read.)
The result of Microsoft’s anti-piracy DRM was that people who actually forked over the money for Windows were affected, while pirated copies that had disabled WGA were fine. From PC Magazine:
One aspect of the nightmare scenario should be discussed now. What kind of system is this, anyway? There should be no way that a legitimate user of a product should be suddenly cut off from use of that product because of an authentication server error, ever.
All this proves is that these Web-based applications cannot be trusted. A hacker attack on the WGA servers could shut down literally millions of machines whose users stupidly subscribed to this supposed “advantage,” which does little more than look for pirated copies of the OS. And yes, some users are not stupid but were forced to use the system. Others were hounded or tricked.
If this WGA were designed right in the first place, the computers that found the server inoperative when they checked in to it should have internal code that validates their OS until the server comes back up. Maybe it is too hard for Microsoft’s 20,000 coders to manage this sort of thing. Too logical.
All the chatter on the message boards during the outage slowly got around to the subject of switching to Linux; there is no way such a thing could ever happen to Linux users. This is not what Microsoft wants to read, especially on its own forums. One could only imagine the screeching if the WGA server had still been down on Monday.
Web radio had a small triumph this week in the royalty cap agreement between the music industry’s Sound Exchange and the Digital Media Association (DiMA). The agreement doesn’t make everything sunshine and roses for the webcasters, but a war has to be won by battles.
Also of note in the agreement was the elimination of Digital Rights Management (DRM) from this part of the discussion.
On the bright side, it doesn’t appear as if DRM is part of the terms this time around. Previously, SoundExchange stated that webcasters who agree to the deal must actively “work to stop users from engaging in 'streamripping'." This began a war of words between the Digital Media Association (DiMA) and SoundExchange, with DiMA accusing SoundExchange of using rate negotiations to push mandatory DRM. SoundExchange fired back, saying that DiMA only continues to spread misinformation about its requests. Earlier this month, however, two senators warned SoundExchange not to push DRM in its negotiations.
The score is Linux: lots, Microsoft: zero
A Microsoft vulnerability report suggests that Microsoft wasn’t able to fix more Windows flaws than the number of open software flaws fixed by the major open source companies. Red Hat, having forty times less employees than Microsoft, did the best job, by fixing and closing the most security bugs, also closing even minor bugs - where Microsoft didn’t even fix one minor bug in the same period.
Read the vulnerability report.
InfoWorld reports on the next big things in IT, and for open source, they declare that the future is “innovation through recombination.”
Open source allows startups to take the bits of Linux and other open source projects they need and combine them in new ways that deliver new capabilities. Companies have already started down the path of designing configurable Linux configurations meant to be combined with other software components to create purpose-built solutions. Open source allows us to move beyond the stale traditions of certified stacks of software to truly integrated solutions that home in on specific needs.
Quicktime | Real
Real Stream | Ogg Theora
Harmonization of patent law? That’s a new one.
Internet Archive defeats ‘National Security Letter,’ Makes it public
Open Source Initiative Responds to OLPC article.
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