Moved by Freedom - Powered by Standards

This week started the wrong way. Some people started to create what is litterally a storm in the teacup, while some other people made announcements that in my view are extremely disappointing and quite concerning for some practitioners of FOSS licensing management and consultancy. Let me explain this point first.

Black Duck was awarded a patent on Open Source licensing conflict resolution. The patent itself seems to cover the “core technology” of the software developed by Black Duck, and not the actual practice of FOSS licensing management and optimization, which is something that Ars Aperta incidently offers both through its traditional services and certification programs. I have to say that I am not really sure what the patent covers or does not cover, but it sure brings a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt for the existing competitors or potential competitors of Black Duck Software, existing consultancies in similar field and last but not least, customers. No wonder Bradley Kuhn got upset about this. I do find these news quite unsettling myself, and I cannot wait to see Black Duck’s patent promise. At least that should remind some not to trust so called Open Source experts who use laptops with Windows, MS Office and Internet Explorer. It’s a small but telling sign they treat FOSS as some sort of disease and not as something to rationally analyze and assist their customers on. And do I need to repeat this again here? Software patents are bad, they stifle competition, customer choice, block innovation and lessen value. You may call them a reality, you don’t have to necessarily add to it.

What really strikes me as a real storm in the tea-cup is the pseudo announcement that Ubuntu will drop Openoffice.org from its upcoming Lucid Lynx release, in its netbook edition. The news came from this website and got quickly picked out by the largest french newspaper, stirring quite an uproar among the French community.

Let me offer some thoughts on why these news are nothing short of non-news, aside the mere fact that there is no official announcement by Canonical or any Ubuntu release team on this matter.

• First, OpenOffice.org is a large application that usually runs well even on netbooks, but may not be the best tailored tool for specific uses envisioned for netbook users. There is nothing surprising in this, and several Linux distributions have actually never included OpenOffice.org by default because of size constraints and simplicity.

• Second, even if Ubuntu were to drop OpenOffice.org from its specific netbook edition it does not mean that the software would be unavailable from the very same Ubuntu repositories. In fact it would be readily available, but it just would not be included in the default installation. How many computers shipped with Windows only include a trial version of Microsoft Word and not a coherent MS Office stack? Almost all of them don’t ship with the full copy of MS Office.

• Third, we recently got hold of the first reliable statistics, aside our own count of downloads, of the actual market share of OpenOffice.org on a worldwide scale. And guess what? With these numbers, we won’t be exactly hampered by whatever decision not to ship OpenOffice.org in the default install set of Ubuntu netbook edition.

What is now needed is some sort of acknowledgment by the broader community of analysts that these stats are reliable. This would cause some real problems to Microsoft, as these statistics usually only count the shipments or the default installation images of MS Windows that come preloaded with one trial version of MS Word. Unless Microsoft patents some new market share analysis method, that is.

Share This

• So it happened. Oracle has swallowed Sun Microsystems. Monty should have gotten the news by now. Perhaps he could even be interested by the announcements of Oracle? They’re hiring good sales reps. More seriously, the announcements done through webcasts and available on the Oracle website are very impressive, product-wise and strategy-wise. Better server offerings, more powerful hardware, Java continued, OpenDocument Format praised. If Oracle executes what they just announced, we might actually end up having FUN, with capital letters. On the specific chapter of OpenOffice.org, an ODF-based, online version of OpenOffice.org has been announced and my small finger tells me that it’s going to be a very good surprize. What remains to be seen, of course, is whether Oracle will find this strategy to be profitable enough. They have discussed investments so far, but one should also expect the cost cutting part of the equation. Another thing that worries me is the lack of  clear emphasis on Free & Open Source. I hear “Open Systems”, “Open Standards” and “Open everything”. But the tough part will also be in the governance of existing Free and Open Source projects.  This being said, I have to stress how pleased I have been by what I heard and watched so far. So pleased, in fact, that it seems to me that Oracle has ended up merging with Sun, more than merely acquiring it. The result might very well end up being Sun on steroids, or Sun with a new sales department and a serious database offering that Monty hates. Good luck and congratulations!
• What I have not enjoyed was the presentation of Apple’s iPad. To be sure, it’s a nice device, and I understand that it’s not being advertised as some sort of netbook or affordable MacBook. It’s actually a very nice device, looking like a beautiful picture frame. The inherent weakness is that it strikes me as a more powerful iPhone. The smart part of that story is that Apple is essentially offering easy and elegant Internet browsing to anyone by minimizing its own costs and risk taking. The bad part is that the iPad is riddled with DRM, and that you are essentially locked up in Apple’s infamous App Store. In short, it’s a device letting you browse the Internet as long as Apple wants it, depriving you of your most basic digital freedoms. I do not think that it will pay and that in the end, sole consumer’s satisfaction induced by very powerful marketing and excellent user experience will be enough. Other competitors will eventually be “as good” as Apple, with less restrictions and less of that Diva-like behaviour, which is another way to write the words “anti-competitive” and “proprietary”.

We are in the end of January 2010: Sun just disappeared, Apple re-releases its Newton. Happy future, everyone.

Share This

This is also true for companies. Today, the European Commission has finally agreed to the purchase of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. Russian and Chinese authorities have yet to answer to this deal, but it seems that any Monty-backed answer would be more a delay than a stop for this merger to happen. I would therefore like to say Goodbye to Sun Microsystems. It’s been great working with you, it’s been great sharing years of my life as a Free Software contributor. You were one of these IT companies who have this strange ability to make all of us dream and feel confident we could just walk further than anyone else.

I look forward working with  “another you”, inside the broader Oracle Corporation, and I am sure that it will be exciting.  So farewell, Sun. Hopefully your employees will not forget who you were, what you stood for: excellency in technology, freedom, genius, and inspiration.

My friend Simon Phipps got that on Facebook for the occasion.

Share This

Sometimes inbetween Christmas and New Year’s Eve, the “Help MySQL” initiative was founded. This initiative, publicly supported by Monty Widenius, the co-founder of MySQL would be interesting if it wasn’t somehow indecent. Let me explain.

What does “Help MySQL” advocate, in a nutshell? It claims that if Oracle were to merge with Sun, MySQL customers would be trapped in a market that would be pretty much controlled and captured by Oracle, both through its existing propietary databases offerings and the acquisition of MySQL. Another issue explained on the web site is that the inherent free and open source nature of MySQL will not be enough to grant effective freedoms to the market since Oracle would be the sole copyright owner of the code and trademarks.

I think I will not be the only one to notice that in a whooping twist of history, Monty Widenius explains us why the business and contribution model to MySQL he crafted himself since the beginning of the database company is terrible for customers. I am always quite skeptical of the “do as I say not as I do” lines of thinking, but so be it, let’s carry along. For months now, Monty and his interesting (and interested) acolyte, Florian Mueller,  have been lobbying everything that seems to be possibly lobbied, from the press to the European Commission where they seemed to have been giving a hard time to Oracle, confused the European anti-trust with byzantine arguments leading to have MySQL relicensed under the BSD while portraying Microsoft as “understanding towards the Open Source ecosystem”.

You might then ask, again, why would Monty want MySQL back, or separated from Oracle?  What would Monty Widenius, co-founder of MySQL, and recently an advisor of the Microsoft’s Codeplex Foundation, counter Sun’s acquisition by Oracle after having left Sun as fast as he could have? There seems to be many reasons, at least on a personal level. One of them, as Jan Wildeboer outlined today, might be that Monty just does not want to leave the command of MySQL. The problem is that the “competitive case” just does not seem to exist here. Not only can anyone fork MySQL (Monty already did it by the way), but the database market is competitive enough to have other credible incumbents fill in the gap, if Oracle were to become.. carnivorous, which remains to be proven. But there are other reasons, some of whose can be foreseen if one thinks about the possible outcomes of Oracle’s walking away from the merger at the end of the month. Sun Microsystems lost several of its most profitable and large customers with the globlal financial crisis. It is doubtful whether Sun could actually survive in the end. Sun would then be sold by chunks, and I cannot wait to see who would buy MySQL back… Monty Widenius, a fellow of the Microsoft’s Codeplex Foundation, and a man who describes the asserted and patented monopoly as being “benevolent and understanding towards Open Source”. There you go, I know you must feel reassured that MySQL will end up in good hands if it does fall in Oracle’s portfolio.

Sun Microsystems being sold in chunks, or being merged with Oracle raises a lot of questions that I ‘m not aware Monty Widenius ever addressed in a constructive way: What about Java, OpenOffice.org, and OpenSolaris (other examples might also be found)? I have not heard a word from Monty Widenius. The future of ODF does not seem to be very important, just like, in the same way, his new colleague at the Codeplex Foundation, Miguel de Icaza, seems to think. Perhaps the quest for another billion is too important and therefore Monty just hasn’t found the time to think and focus about other issues. By helping MySQL, it seems to me you are also helping the personal wealth of a billionaire who calls evil what some might do in the future while forgetting he did the same before.

All things considered, I am not really excited at the prospect of “saving MySQL”, and neither should you. For 2010, let’s rather focus on constructive conversations and projects.

Happy New Year 2010!

Share This

Fall season is one of the busiest times for Linux distributions, and this year is also a very busy time for me.  Ever since two years now I gradually migrated family and friends to Linux. This year these new Linux users gave me quite some work, especially on week-ends, and my own upgrade gave me quite some work. You might think that the people I installed Linux systems on their laptops would be autonomous and relying on forums when help were needed. Think again: Usability of every day applications may have never been easy, but installing new applications is something that still has not gotten through them, at least on a regular basis, and this means they rely on their favourite system administrator (me) to fix whatever issues they have. But it’s somewhat of a vicious circle, because I guess I enjoy helping them myself, and to add to the pleasure I installed different distributions for each of them. Below is the list of the computers I am watching over:

• Melissa’s laptop: running the latest Mandriva
• My father’s laptop: used to run Ubuntu until Karmic Koala that messed up everything, now it runs the latest OpenSuse
• Jeremie and Alexandra’s laptop: running Ubuntu (before it was running Vista, or rather, was coughing up Vista until Ubuntu made it possible to actually do something with the laptop).
• My workstation (my laptop is a Mac): running Fedora by default, now running Ubuntu Karmic Koala.

Let’s start with the easiest: the upgrade of Jeremie and Alexandra’s laptop to Ubuntu. The upgrade was a breeze, contrary to reports in the press and what happened with the upgrade on my father’s laptop. Usually Jeremie uprades its system himself but this time, I insisted on attending in case of a problem. There was none.

Next was Melissa’s laptop. Melissa has a Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled, but she never really liked it. She tried Mandriva at the beginning of 2009 and was immediately sold on it. The upgrade to the Mandriva 2010 was not overly problematic but somehow did not go all the way till the end. I quickly relaunched the upgrade procedure and everything went fine. Mandriva is graphically one of the most beautiful distributions out there, fares better than Ubuntu in many ways but sometimes fails in the availability of packages. I shall come back to this later.

Next my father upgraded its system as he is used to ever since two years, but this time when he rebooted he found himself with Xubuntu, and Xfce desktop he never wanted and a laptop showing what I call the “Windows symptom”: bloated, noisy, humming, doing everything slow and having an hyperactive hard disk. As I had heard about the problematic upgrade of the newest Ubuntu I was prepared for a total system reinstallation, but having seen the ease of use of Mandriva before I thought that changing distributions would be a good idea. More specifically, Mandriva and OpenSuse have something no other distribution (aside a few others such as Sabayon, Parsix …) has: an all in one, integrated configuration center that does everything from switching wallpaper to configuring the wireless connection and managing packages. Ubuntu desperately needs one, because newbies have only one place to remember in order to manage their system, whether it’s Drake Center or YAST. I burned a couple of live CDs, one with Mandriva and the other one with OpenSuse (both on Gnome, my father does not seem to enjoy KDE 4). Mandriva was ruled out probably because my father did not seem to like the graphical style of Mandriva, and thus we settled for OpenSuse. The installation process was uneventful, although it seems that the ability to upgrade from one version to a more recent one is really experimental. YAST was well accepted, but there is a funny anecdote about the OpenSuse interface: OpenSuse has put the Gnome main task bar at the bottom of the screen, which really annoyed my father as he wanted to have it on top of the screen. I do notice that he completely got out of the “it’s not like Windows” theme only to adopt the “it’s not like the regular version of Gnome”! I can’t wait for Gnome 3.0…

Next, I had to work on my own system, which was a finely tuned Fedora Core 11. Helas, the upgrade was one of the worst experiences I had with Linux distributions. Shortly put, I think it was a bad mistake for Fedora to have claimed its 12 version was ready. It frankly was not ten days ago and I doubt it’s ready even now. First, the special software used to upgrade distributions, “preupgrade” had a bug and was only discovered 24 hours before the release, which forced thousands of users including me to look for the newest version that wasn’t on the official mirrors. The upgrade itself took a long time  but of course it also depends on the system that was installed before. When the upgrade process was finished I found myself with a half baked Fedora 12. Cleaning the installation packages I was not cautious enough in realising that the drivers (both free and proprietary) were still working with the existing kernel although they were marked as “fc 11″. Cleaning the packages, as advised by every manual, erased them and I discovered afterwards that there was no available drivers for nvidia cards on Fedora 12, either free or proprietary (or rather that the packages were not ready yet). So I found myself losing the X server for good, and given my experience with the new Fedora 12, I decided, although I had lost a good day, to make a clean install on the next morning.

On the next morning indeed, I installed a fresh live CD from Fedora 12. But the live system would not recognize my wireless network nor would it even link to any driver for 3D. At that point I got really frustrated but was still willing to go with Fedora if no other distribution were to offer any significant advantage in its configuration. I gave a try to OpenSuse, which automatically recognized my wireless network, and explained me that 3D was not available but that I could enable it by following some simple steps. I was not going to go with OpenSuse, as it always strikes me as a good distribution but one that for some reason is not very appealing to me and has too much of mono everywhere (and no, I don’t consider OpenSuse as being some kind of traitor to Free Software, let alone because it’s clearly out of the deal between Novell and Microsoft!). I hesitated about Mandriva. What hold me back was the lack of certain libs for some special -and a bit obscure- 3D graphic software that I use and also because Second Life does not seem to run well on it. Otherwise I would not have hesitated. Anyway, I ended up testing out the latest Ubuntu. Guess what? Everything was easy, fast, wireless network recognized, 3D drivers enabled in a minute. It was a real relief for me, and so far I must say Karmic is a really good release.

Last but not least, here’s some “post mortem” analysis of the situation: This fall season saw a lot of problematic upgrades. I seem to give a hard time to Fedora, but in retrospect Fedora Core 11 was a good distribution; I am just disappointed at the lack of readiness of the Fedora infrastructure for such a major release. I’ll probably go back to Fedora some time, because it’s targeted at people just like me: power users who like it easy but still a bit rough (hey, it’s like barbecue folks). Fedora has also some unique features for advanced users: Assistants to configure services and security profiles are a must and simply do not exist on Ubuntu (they do on OpenSuse and Mandriva in a different way though). But not shunning away from the command line does not mean having to deal with issues related with poor work, and that’s what made me switch.

As for Ubuntu I felt at first almost bored that I to go for the choice everyone was making. But here’s what I think Ubuntu has become. In some ways Ubuntu, or more exactly the ubiquitous availability of deb packages through the system of PPAs (extra, adhoc software repositories hosted by Ubuntu itself) and the third parties repositories, is turning Ubuntu into an universal distribution, or perhaps a meta-distribution of sorts. The question of the availability of packages had already been solved by Debian and to the same extent by Red Hat. What we’re witnessing now is more and more applications being ported or packaged for Ubuntu, not so much because it’s the more popular distribution du jour but because Canonical made it really easy to have its software available online for millions (yes, millions) of users.

Thus, in a strange display of irony, Ubuntu is becoming what Debian always wanted to be in some way: the universal system for all. Linux distributions will not stop surprising me, after all.

Share This