• Basics - How to Travel at a Million Files a Minute - NYTimes.com

  “When that day comes, there will be much rejoicing. But until then, there are things users can do to make sure their connections are as fast as possible. Here are a few ways”

  tags: OB, internet, speed, DSL, cable, Firefox

Marko Schuetz sent me a note saying that he has now placed online materials for a course on free and open source software. Links: main website, text, slides.

Disclaimer: I haven’t had a chance to go through it, but thought some readers might find it useful.

This year’s OpenOffice.org Conference will take in place in Beijing from November 5th through 7th. I was hoping to get over there for it but I have a travel conflict. The program looks great!

My son and I just got invited into The Wrath of the Lich King beta program for World of Warcraft. Tres cool. We’re psyched.

• Editorial: Collaboration is the new revolution | Comment is free | The Guardian

  “Big corporations, such as IBM, Google and Amazon, are devourers of open source software because they find it cheap, efficient, low-maintenance and reliable. But UK government departments, including health and the foreign office, have proved risk-averse with hardly any open source in their infrastructure.”

  tags: OB, open source, UK

• Open Source Copyrights Legally Enforceable, Appeals Court Rules — Open Source — InformationWeek

  “Ruling on an appeal brought by software developer Robert Jacobsen, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said Wednesday that open source users that do not comply with the software’s strict licensing terms can, in fact, be sued for copyright infringement — even if the software is free.”

  tags: OB, open source, legal

• Play more ‘Warcraft,’ get sued for malpractice less | Crave, the gadget blog - CNET

  “OK, first off, the idea that video games are good for you is not a new one. I mean, I’ve seen plenty of studies saying video games improve everything from hand-eye coordination to driving skills. This is, however, the first time I’ve seen the benefits directed at surgeons. I guess some surgeons needed to justify the increased amount of raiding they’ve been doing lately. According to the study, laparoscopic surgeons who play video games are apparently 27 percent faster at advanced surgical procedures and made 37 percent fewer errors than surgeons who do not game. Hmmm, I guess the most interesting part of that for me was that there was that much room for improvement in advanced surgical procedures.”

  tags: OB, NP, medicine, World of Warcraft

Although I’ve previously published the slides for the talk I gave at LinuxWorld 2008 in San Francisco, I thought it might be useful to add some additional comments in the blog about each of the eight predictions I made. This is not the full text of what I said nor a full discussion of the slide, but just some ideas that flesh out what I meant.

If we consider a simplified software stack, right above the hardware is the operating system. Clearly with Linux, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, and others, free and open source have had great success.

Above this we have what IBM and others call middleware: http servers, Java web servers, databases, email servers, groupware, and other types of servers. Apache rules the http server space, both open source and proprietary, while the other categories have strong proprietary and open source entries. Apache Geronimo, Red Hat JBoss, MySQL, Postgres, Apache Derby, Yahoo Zimbra, Scalix, and many other open source projects have been successful in getting developers and users to adopt them.

Above this we have the cross-industry application areas like ERP and CRM. Compiere is well known in the open source ERP space, though there are other contenders and people seem to be looking seriously at what open source providers are developing in this area. In the CRM area there are many projects, though SugarCRM is probably the best known.

As an alternative to “CRM on my server,” there is also the SalesForce.com software-as-a-service offering. Of course, in the proprietary space, Oracle and SAP aren’t doing so badly.

Just about every industry has customers that need to be managed, even if you call them “clients” or “donors.” Every industry deals with payroll. Every industry has supply chain, even if it’s to order beverages for the vending machine down the hall. I call this category “generic businessware.”

The big systems provide common modules and then allow you to extend the system in various ways. So if you have an “enterprise application suite” then it might have the usual software but also custom developed applications or user-designed reports, for example.

Above either the operating system, middleware, or the generic businessware levels it is possible to build applications that only work in one specific industry. It is these industry-specific applications that I am addressing in this prediction.

So far we have seen very few open source industry specific applications or frameworks outside the public sector. In Education, both Sakai and Moodle are doing well and compete vigorously against each other.

Over at Eclipse there is the Open Healthcare Framework (OHF) Project which is described as

… a project within Eclipse formed for the purpose of expediting healthcare informatics technology. The project is composed of extensible frameworks and tools which emphasize the use of existing and emerging standards in order to encourage interoperable open source infrastructure, thereby lowering integration barriers. We currently provide tools and Frameworks for HL7, IHE, Terminology, Devices, and Public Healthcare Maintenance.

Outside the public sector, I’m aware of the OpenQuote project for the insurance industry. Beyond that … not so much.

I’ve been quoted in a couple of articles because during the talk I said that I’m tired of waiting for more open source industry applications. That is, if more are coming, they are taking their time!

Given the open source industry applications that already exist, we know that the future is not one that only has proprietary industry applications. Will all such applications eventually be open source? If not, what will be the balance between open source and proprietary applications in this area? Right now it is overwhelmingly in favor of proprietary.

Maybe that’s the way it will stay. There’s no guarantee we will see a huge movement to open source industry applications. Will the wait for the “Year of Desktop Linux” be replaced by that for the “Year of Open Source Industry Applications”?

I don’t think we need to wait forever to find out. Open source in general has huge momentum but there may end up being market categories that are resistant to the movement. At some point you have to look at what is going on and say “you know, I really don’t think it’s going to happen.”

I’m offering this observation as someone who has looked at open source for some time, not as someone who is particularly bemoaning the absence of these applications. That is, I don’t personally need the open source apps just as I don’t personally even need the proprietary ones.

The public sector really seems different here and I think it’s important not to extrapolate to other industries. That is, don’t say that just because open source is so strong in Education that means it is just a matter of time before it becomes dominant in Chemical/Petroleum.

Now if you disagree with me here, just as you might disagree with what I’ve said in the other predictions, you have a great opportunity to prove me wrong.

Start coding!

Get a community together. Figure out your business model. Evangelize. Build to real requirements of industry. Do it better than the proprietary guys. Don’t just solve the problems that were figured out before, offer solutions to the really thorny issues that affect us now and are growing worse.

Of course, the “proprietary guys” won’t be sitting still either. Competition will drive innovation and value for the customer.

Unless something changes drastically, I don’t see open source growing rapidly and soon in the broad industry application space. Maybe it will just take more than ten years, but as I said in the talk, “either it will happen or it won’t.”

If you want it to happen, make it so. That’s the power of the model and the community for important software that solves real problems.

Previous: LinuxWorld 2008 Prediction #7: Standards

For several weeks now I’ve been wondering why I’ve occasionally had problems where I hit the CPU limit for the sutor.com site on the webserver. As some of you may remember, I had a lot of problems with this last year until I until I coughed up more cash per month for more cycles. I just discovered that the cross-linker WordPress plugin was spitting out errors every time it was used. I don’t know how long this was happening, but it generated immense error logs (175Mb file, anyone?). This would slow things down.

I’ve deactivated this plugin for now, but since I moved to it from aLinks, I’m without software that automatically inserts links around terms like “ODF”, “Ubuntu,” and “WordPress.” I had the latest version of cross-linker. Maybe I’ll check out the latest version of aLinks or just write my own plugin.

I did a podcast today for one of the LinuxWorld predictons (#7) as an experiment, and I discovered that the RSS feed of entries with attached podcasts was pointing to the old category URL rather than the tag URL. That’s now been fixed.

• An Antic Disposition: Giving the Finger to the DIS 29500 Appellants

  “The news broke on Friday, with the ISO press release, and additional coverage and analysis by Andy Updegrove and on Groklaw. But it would be remiss if I did not share a few details on how, true to form, the end of this DIS 29500 process was botched.”

  tags: OB, ISO, IEC, OOXML

• Microsoft fighting cognitive lock-in as users hold on to XP

  “A further indication may come from InfoWorld, which suggests that over a third of what it terms “enterprise class” users are exercising the downgrade option. InfoWorld provides a performance monitoring tool, called Sentinel, that reports in with data about a system’s configuration and operation, allowing the community to analyze the data and detect trends. The InfoWorld staff combed the data for hardware that’s new enough to have shipped after Vista had been preinstalled, and found that 35 percent of it was actually running XP.”

  tags: OB, Microsft, Windows, Vista, XP

• An Introduction To Open Sim: the “Apache of Virtual Worlds” | OStatic

  “You’ve probably read a bit about Open Sim, the BSD-licensed virtual world server, and recent news that IBM and Linden Lab are working to make Second Life and Open Sim interoperable. Besides that project, what’s Open Sim about, who’s working on it, what are they doing with it, and how do you get involved as a developer and participant? Here’s a starter’s guide, created with the help of Tish Shute, whose virtual world blog UgoTrade is an indispensable resource on the latest in Open Sim news.”

  tags: OB, NP, OpenSim, virtual worlds

I said to my son: “Please come help me outside for 5 minutes.”
Son to me: “Does that mean it will take 30 minutes like it usually does?”

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.6.1 from WordPress 2.5.1. Including upload time, the whole process took about 15 minutes.

Although I’ve previously published the slides for the talk I gave at LinuxWorld 2008 in San Francisco, I thought it might be useful to add some additional comments in the blog about each of the eight predictions I made. This is not the full text of what I said nor a full discussion of the slide, but just some ideas that flesh out what I meant.

While some people bemoan the large number of free and open source licenses, the number of distinct intellectual property licenses for standards is probably 20 or 30 times greater. Moreover, not every standards organization has a clear license by which people can understand the rules under which they can implement and otherwise use the standards. It’s a mess.

While there are some organizations that try to synchronize their IP policies, most do not. Some of these licenses are there for some historical reasons, but a very reasonable question to ask is whether we really need so many of them?

Are these organizations so unique that they need to have a special policy? In most cases, I think not.

What drove them to have different policies? For some, they were breaking new ground, but for others it was a Not-Invented-Here syndrome.

Was vanity involved? You might call it that, but it could also be “policy by committee” where everyone involved just had to have that special clause in there that was all theirs.

Really, though, how many distinct standards intellectual property policies do we really need to cover the gamut from the most liberal, open-sourcey, royalty-free-ish organization to the most classic, conservative, patent-cherishing organization?

It’s not a thousand. It’s not a hundred. My guess is that maybe 5 to 10 would do.

In my last blog posting I mentioned that 10 free and open source licenses account for over 93% of all use in open source projects.

Over at the Creative Commons, they’ve worked out six licenses that allow for several types of “free” use of creative content. The website allows you to check a few options, answer a few questions, and voila, you have a license.

I think something similar could work for standards organizations. Even though mathematically the different possible options for each element of a license could lead to a combinatorial explosion, in practice only one or two of the options are in common use.

We need to develop this small number of license templates and we need to get standards organizations to commit to using them, without change. No tweaking. No saying “Well, we’re special so we’re going to modify this area.” You’re not special.

[Note that some article I saw said that I recommended that we only have a handful of standards organizations. I actually said that we only need a handful of standards organization intellectual property policies.]

If there were fewer licenses, they would be better understood. Approval to participate in standards efforts would become simpler. We would better know how to create products and software that mixed and matched standards from different sources. We would better understand how standards licenses lined up with open source licenses. Field of use, anyone?

Finally, the whole OOXML debacle has started an examination of the processes under which standards organizations operate, including their IP policies. There is too much fuzziness in the latter and, combined with other bad if not imperious behavior, could lead to some standards groups going out of business or radically losing status in the next decade.

Just because a standard organization can get started doesn’t mean it can’t shut down. They have a life cycle, just like anything else. I suspect that some of them are nearing the end.

Next: LinuxWorld 2008 Prediction #8: Industry applications

Previous: LinuxWorld 2008 Prediction #6: FOSS licenses

As some of you may have noticed, there has been a problem with the RSS and ATOM feeds for this blog for a few days. I first noticed it yesterday and others then mentioned it to me.

My first thought? “I didn’t changed anything, how could it break?”

My second thought was that WordPress 2.6.1 is about to come out, so I will wait and install that. Perhaps the problem will magically go away.

It turns out that I did change one little thing, turning off feed tracking in Mint, my stats application. Unfortunately, I didn’t deactivate the WordPress plugin that inserted the tracking code. So the feeds got all messed up.

The new version of WordPress would not have fixed anything and might have made it harder to debug.

Things seem stable now, feed-wise. I plan to upgrade to WordPress 2.6.1 over the weekend. (What do YOU do on Saturday and Sunday?) My new policy is to wait the month after a major new release of WordPress to pick up the bug fix release. It’s not hard but it is also not trivial to move to a new version, so I’ve decided it’s better to not quite be on the bleeding edge.

• The Front-Runner’s Fall

  “How did things look on the inside, as they unraveled? To find out, I approached a number of current and former Clinton staffers and outside consultants and asked them to share memos, e-mails, meeting minutes, diaries—anything that would offer a contemporaneous account. The result demonstrates that paranoid dysfunction breeds the impulse to hoard. Everything from major strategic plans to bitchy staff e-mail feuds was handed over.”

  tags: OB, politics

• Metamorphosis - Poland: Ministry of Education recommends Open Source

  “The Polish Ministry of National Education is advising schools and universities to use Open Source software. The recommendation comes at the end of a volunteer campaign to help schools switch to Open Source. The Ministry recommended in a statement that schools and universities use OpenOffice. The application suite is sufficiently mature and advanced to be used for teaching and for office use in education and science institutes. “OpenOffice can successfully substitute proprietary applications and will result in significant savings on licenses.”"

  tags: OB, open source, OpenOffice.org, Poland

Although I’ve previously published the slides for the talk I gave at LinuxWorld 2008 in San Francisco, I thought it might be useful to add some additional comments in the blog about each of the eight predictions I made. This is not the full text of what I said nor a full discussion of the slide, but just some ideas that flesh out what I meant.

Some people have interpreted this slide as being all about ending the proliferation of new open source licenses. I do think we probably have enough licenses to keep us busy for a long time, but I was trying to make other points.

First, even if new licenses arrive, almost everyone will ignore them. That is, the Open Source Initiative might approve new licenses, but it will be the core set of licenses we have now that will dominate the next decade, just as they are doing today. To me, those licenses are:

• GPL v2 and LGPL v2
• GPL v3 and LGPL v3
• Apache License 2.0
• Eclipse Public License
• Mozilla Public License
• Artistic License
• BSD licenses
• MIT license

Feel free to throw in one or two more if it makes you happy or if you think I inadvertently left one out.

According to the list of most widely used FOSS licenses at Black Duck Software, these licenses account for almost 93.5% of all free and open source projects.

All the rest of the free and open source licenses will be fighting over less than 10% of the projects out there. One license not on the list is the Affero flavor of GPL v3 which could strongly come into play if free software gets used more in cloud computing and SaaS. If the license does get widely used, I’m going to cover myself and just say that it is a version of GPL!

So it’s not so much that we won’t see more licenses come on the scene and thus proliferation must be kept in check, it’s more that no one will care. Go ahead, create that vanity open source license, but think twice if you believe you are making the world a better place. Probably you’re just annoying people instead of getting them interested in the software you’ve created.

I should note that it’s not simply how many projects use a given license, it’s the importance of the projects. The Apache License is only #5 on Black Duck’s list with 2.81%, but the IT and general world would be in a very sorry state without the work being done at the Apache Software Foundation. (And yes, people outside the ASF also use the Apache license.

Second, of the licenses that are in wide use by significant projects, I don’t think we’re going to see significant legal changes. There might be some tinkering with them, but I doubt that there will be a GPL v4 in the next 10 years.

Third, as FOSS gets used more and more by big organizations with significant legal infrastructure, there will be a lot of pressure to keep using the existing, well understood licenses. If you made the leap to open source, you probably don’t want to spend a lot of additional attorney dollars (or Euros or Yen or …) figuring out the latest license du jour, as I termed it in the talk.

Indeed, part of a strategy to get open source more widely used in the enterprise could very well be to freeze license changes for the next few years.

Finally, though we might not see more licenses appearing and becoming popular, I do think we’ll be dealing more with how to assemble multiple pieces of software that come under separate licenses. Sample request to your IP attorney: “I want to release a product that uses custom code, LGPL v3 code, Apache code, and Eclipse code. Tell me how to do it.” The formulas for doing this and other combinations will become better understood in the next few years.

Next: LinuxWorld 2008 Prediction #7: Standards

Previous: LinuxWorld 2008 Prediction #5: SMB

• Microsoft in Flickr rights shockr | News - Digital Media - CNET News.com

  “Here’s a particularly entertaining thread on Flickr, in which members vent at the fact that their photos–many of which had been set for private viewing only–had been scraped by Microsoft and pulled over, creditless, to Microsoft’s servers. Amusingly, some of the scraped “entries” were of iconic British landscapes such as that of, er, Tennessee.”

  tags: OB, Microsoft, Flickr, UK, photography