This is the second Sunday installment of the weekly open source news spotlight to cover the hottest open source news. Unfortunately, this has been a slow week for open source news. I suspect that most companies are holding press releases and other announcements until the Open Source Business Conference February 14^th & 15^th in San Francisco. I will be attending the conference, and I hope to find time to blog from the event next week.

The GPL debate continued this week with a number of open source advocates calling for patience during this process. They stress that the license is still in the draft phase, and it is too early to predict with any certainty what the final product will or will not contain. They caution against taking a strong stance on whether or not to accept GPL V3 until the license is in its final stages.

The most interesting rumor of the week is that Oracle may acquire three popular open source companies: JBoss, Zend, and Sleepcat. This follows a recent acquisition of Innobase, an open source database company. Oracle is embracing open source software and planning to charge regular fees based on a subscription business model, rather than charging per license. Subscription models that charge users for support and maintenance have been one of the most popular open source business models. This news concerns me for a couple of reasons.

• First, Oracle could gain considerable control over the open source stack, which according to one source close to the deal, is exactly what Oracle plans to do. When any one company gains too much control over the ecosystem, it tends to stifle innovation and reduce interoperability.
• Second, Oracle may not be able to effectively assimilate these companies. Oracle is still digesting the Siebel and PeopleSoft acquisitions, which tends to be a lengthy and difficult process that can become self-destructive when too many companies are acquired in a short period of time without giving the companies enough time to work out the internal thrash. These open source companies may be more difficult to assimilate given their unique corporate cultures. Open source companies tend to have cultures that are very different from more traditional, proprietary companies, which may result in an internal culture clash between Oracle employees and open source employees.

The companies are still in talks and have not finalized any of these deals. Some speculate that JBoss may not be worth the price they are asking; however, Marc Fleury (JBoss CEO / Founder) is a smart guy who has repeatedly stressed that JBoss is not for sale, and he may be using the high price to keep JBoss independent unless it becomes really lucrative to become acquired. I will be anxiously watching as these deals develop.

Eclipse, the open source Java development tool, is cited in the news several times this week as big competition for other Java development products. Oracle goes head to head with Eclipse by releasing their new free version of JDeveloper, while Borland exits the tools business with plans to sell JBuilder and other tools citing competition with Eclipse as one reason for this departure.

Novell helps to enhance the look and feel of the Linux desktop this week with the release of considerable enhancements to the XGL framework. Enhancements include a virtual desktop affixed to a cube that rotates, transparent objects, and increased text display speeds.

One final tidbit … This week, Sun and OpenOffice.org ran ads on the sides of buses in Microsoft’s home town of Redmond, WA.

Check back next week for another rundown of the week’s top open source stories.

It is great to see an article like this in the mainstream media (Fox News) saying that open source software can be just as good as commercial software. The article goes on to recommend six of the best open source programs including Firefox, Thunderbird, and Gimp. We need articles like this one to help raise public awareness of open source software outside of the geek community.

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I ran across this article on Digg today, which claims there are two ways that “Microsoft sabotages Linux desktop adoption”. I am not going to attempt to determine whether or not Microsoft engages in these behaviors; however, I think that this article leaves out a few important issues.

For the record, this is an open source blog, and I am an advocate for open source. I would like to see more people using Linux on the desktop; however, I also think that we need to accurately recognize the challenges with Linux desktop adoption. By understanding why people resist using Linux on the desktop, we can work to tear down the barriers to adoption.

The author claims that Microsoft “has convinced users that a switch to a competing office suite would require too many sacrifices.” This may or may not be true; however, it does not effectively address the issue of resistance to change. In general, people get accustomed to a certain environment and tend to resist ANY changes that are introduced; this is true of most business change efforts, but for some reason, major technology changes seem to have an extremely disruptive influence on at least a portion of the install base. During any migration, we need to recognize that change is hard, and it will take quite a bit of time to get people comfortable with a new environment. I suspect that the natural human tendency to resist change is a more important factor than any specific actions by Microsoft.

The author also says that Microsoft uses its influence to coerce hardware vendors not to support Linux. This refers to the issue that Linux cannot easily be used with certain hardware configurations because the hardware manufactures have not made Linux drivers available. Again, I will not attempt to determine whether or not Microsoft coerces hardware vendors. I do know that when a market exists for a product, companies will usually do whatever it takes to provide a product for the market. In other words, if enough people are running Linux on the desktop, the desktop hardware manufactures will provide support for Linux. This is the chicken and egg problem that I have discussed frequently on this blog. Vendors will not support a product without a critical mass of users, and users will tend not to use a product that vendors do not support. This is a problem with hardware support (drivers) and application availability. We need to recognize this problem if we want to resolve it. I actually think that the driver support for Linux on the desktop is starting to improve (very slowly) due to the vocal minority. Linux desktop users tend to be a small group of people; however, they also tend to be intelligent, loyal, and very vocal when vendors do not step up to provide support for Linux. To overcome this chicken and egg problem, Linux desktop users need to continue to complain frequently, publicly and directly to the companies that are not providing drivers to keep the issue of driver availability in the press and on the minds of the vendors. A small, but loyal and vocal, minority can make a difference.

It is easy to blame Microsoft; however, I do not think that placing blame is the most productive use of our time. We need to understand the issues and work to resolve the issues that we can most directly impact if we want to increase adoption of Linux on the desktop.

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Ben Goodger wrote a great blog today about the roots of Firefox. An important part of his article describes the power struggles and other issues that can result between an open source community and a commercial entity that takes the product to market. In some cases, the community and a company can work well together, but in the case of Netscape and Mozilla many of the interactions were quite dysfunctional. This is a great read for both community members and corporate types to better understand some of the challenges of taking open source products to market (what not to do).

This is also a story about knowing when to start over. The user interface for the browser had so many problems that they felt the best course of action was a fresh approach. In my opinion, this is why Firefox has been so incredibly successful with a broad base of users. Quite a few open source products are designed by developers, for developers with little thought given to usability by the masses. Firefox, on the other hand, was designed from the beginning to be a browser that anyone could use and would want to use to browse the web. Firefox is so intuitive and easy to use that anyone, even those without any advanced computer knowledge, can install and use it. The Firefox community of extension and theme developers has also made it easy for anyone to control and customize the user experience without any programming knowledge required. I have coerced friends and co-workers into installing Firefox, and most of them immediately become addicted to one or more Firefox extensions. A friend of mine installed Firefox for his mom; she was not sure about making the change until he showed her the themes, and when she found that she could use a different theme for each holiday or mood, she was converted. Little things can make a big difference in the adoption of any software product, and Firefox’s attention to detail on the user interface paved the way for the broad success that Firefox is currently enjoying.

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This is the first of what I hope will become a weekly segment every Sunday on this blog to recap the hottest open source news of the week.

My favorite rumor of the week was that Google was going to start distributing a version of Linux based on Ubuntu, dubbed Goobuntu, as a way to go up against Microsoft on the desktop. It did not take Google long to begin denying this rumor. While they acknowledge using Ubuntu internally, Google says that they have no plans to distribute it externally; however, analysts still speculate that Google will continue to move into software segments where Microsoft has been strong.

Last week Linus Torvalds said that the Linux kernel would not be using GPL v3, and he continued to clarify his position this week with several additional posts. His main objection seems to revolve around the anti-DRM clause, which Linus says would be more appropriate in a content license, not a software license. He also said that “we do not – as software developers – have the moral right to enforce our rules on hardware manufacturers. We are not crusaders, trying to force people to bow to our superior God. We are trying to show others that co-operation and openness works better.” This highlights the cultural differences between the free software movement, which tends to be more politically motivated (the GPL is driven through the Free Software Foundation), while the open source software proponents tend to focus more on the software with fewer political motivations.

Mozilla delivered an update to Firefox as part of their regular two month upgrade release cycle that fixes several security and stability issues while providing better support for Mac OS X. This update also claims to fix several memory leak problems. Firefox’s memory issues have been my only real problem with Firefox, and I will be interested to see how well this works as I use it over the next week or two.

Novell demoed Linux Desktop 10, which will be released in several months. Key features include the ability to convert VB macros (commonly used in MS Excel files) into a format used by OpenOffice, the capability to play MP3 files out of the box, and the ability to handle digital camera operations seamlessly.

Red Hat joined the effort led by MIT to provide a $100 laptop by donating $2 million to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization. This will not guarantee the use of a Red Hat OS on the laptop; however, early demos of this laptop used a Fedora variant.

Asa Dotzler demonstrates some of the best attributes of open source culture in his evaluation of the new IE7 beta. He does a thorough job of evaluating where his competition is strong and makes suggestions for Firefox improvements in addition to pointing out many areas where IE has followed Firefox innovations. I talk about Firefox frequently in this blog because Firefox is a great example of open source culture at its finest. The Firefox community comes up with original innovations, but they are also willing to acknowledge where others have a better solution. This allows Firefox to innovate ahead of other browsers and use existing ideas from products like IE when it makes the most sense for their users. The culture of innovation and reuse is one reason that open source is becoming the phenomenon that it is today.

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My blog languished while I spent the past 8 days in Hong Kong and Beijing. Sadly, my time in Hong Kong was limited to less than 48 hours for business meetings, but I was able to spend more time in Beijing. When talking to people in Beijing, most inevitably mention the tremendous growth of the city, and the traffic is reminiscent of Silicon Valley before the dot-com bust. During times of rapid population and economic growth, the infrastructure cannot keep pace with the growth of the region. Traffic jams are as much a part of daily life in Beijing as they were in Silicon Valley in 2000.

Like the proliferation of dot-com companies, China is currently experiencing a proliferation of Linux distributors. Most of these, including China Standard Software Company (CS2C), Red Flag, TurboLinux China, and Sun Wah Linux are at least in part supported by various Chinese government agencies. The Chinese government seems to be focused on encouraging the success of local Linux vendors, which helps to promote the local software ecosystem. Like during the dot-com bust, a few companies (like Google) will survive while many others will not last. We will probably see many of these local Linux vendors go out of business or merge with the strongest companies, but it is too early to do more than speculate on which ones will make the cut. Last August, there were a number of rumors about the possibility of a merger between Red Flag, TurboLinux China, and Co-Create, but we have not seen any real consolidation yet.

Linux also appears to be growing rapidly in China as many organizations replace aging Unix servers with Linux and a few governments and schools are starting to deploy Linux desktops. Earlier this month, a new Linux Certification Lab was just announced in China with support by the Free Standards Group. The growth of Linux and efforts like this certification lab highlight the importance of Linux in China. I expect to see the growth of Linux in China continue to accelerate as the local Linux vendors mature and begin to consolidate over the next year or two.

Within a few days of the official announcement of the early release of the new Intel Macs, Firefox has announced a late March release of the Firefox 1.5.0.2 update containing support for Intel Macs. According to the article linked below, as early as July of last year, they had initial development releases available. This is just another illustration of how quickly the open source community can support new product releases.

In addition to quick support, open source products frequently have a transparency and honesty that can be refreshing compared to the secrecy embraced by some proprietary companies. The current development release of Firefox for Intel Macs has two primary issues to be resolved before launch: compatibility issues with Flash and the need for an updated Java plugin. A user or developer can get a much better idea about whether or not a product is likely to hit the launch target when the major challenges are available along with a few details about what is being done to resolve the issues. Developers and savvy users who want to try it out a bit early can download the new version and play around with it (at their own risk, of course) if they want an early look at the product.

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I blogged about this before as the chicken and egg problem with desktop Linux. There are not enough people using Linux on the desktop for software vendors to port desktop apps to Linux, and there are not enough desktop applications for many people to make the switch to desktop Linux.

In the article linked below, Rosenberg suggests building on the momentum of Firefox to help drive Linux on the desktop, and I suspect that we will not see more than a small increase in Linux on the Desktop use in 2006. However, 2006 could be the year of the open source applications. The success of Firefox could lead users to begin to adopt other open source applications (OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird, etc.) As people become more comfortable with open source applications, this trend could drive a few more people to Linux on the desktop. However, we need to get over the chicken and the egg application dilemma before we will see broad adoption of Linux on the desktop for sophisticated business users with large numbers of applications.

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Here is a snippet from an ONLamp.com article titled There Is No Open Source Community.

“Some software vendors believe that open source is an ideological movement. This paradigm ignores the impact of software prices shattered by zero-cost distribution and global collaboration capabilities, both of which the internet fuels. It also ignores one of the primary factors driving customer adoption: rebellion against vendor lock-in. By combining lower cost of production with the additional freedom and flexibility endemic to open source deployments, one sees two dynamics driving both adoption and production. The push of software commoditization and the pull of customer demands have created a perfect storm for open source software.”

The article goes on to suggest that “without prices that approach zero, there is simply no room for viable open source options.” I disagree with this statement; it implies that low prices are a cause for open source success when it is more likely that the two are correlated. In fact, I suspect that open source software is helping to commoditize certain software markets, which could be driving lower prices rather than low prices driving open source. Possibly more important than low prices is that proprietary vendors are often forced to innovate above the areas that have been commoditized in order to justify their pricing structure.

Despite this bit of disagreement, this article makes some really good points.

First, global collaboration has helped fuel the success of open source software. In past blog posts, I have talked about the community element of open source, and global collaboration is a big part of most open source communities. It is amazing how quickly some open source projects are localized in various languages, and the community participation from so many people around the world with diverse backgrounds seems to encourage innovation and improve quality.

Second, rebellion against vendor lock-in is an important driver of open source. Companies want the flexibility that open source solutions provide. In some cases, open source is used by governments and companies in various countries who do not want their money to be spent making western / U.S. software companies even more powerful. See my previous blog post on Global Open Source.

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