Novell/Microsoft agreement: FUD and reasoning

Ever since the Novell/Microsoft agreement was announced I have been looking at reactions in the press and from various blogs and sites like Slashdot and digg. A lot of the "analysis" I see is paranoid speculation, and an unfortunate example of the ugly side of the open source community. Don't get me wrong, I have been a member of that community for over five years and I love this industry dearly. However, sometimes our paranoia goes a little too far. Groklaw was a great site to visit for information on the SCO debacle, but I think PJ's ego has outgrown her abilities and clouded her analysis. She posted an article yesterday titled "Novell 'Forking' OpenOffice.org" where she goes on to announce that Novell is producing, "...a Novell edition of OpenOffice.org and it will support Microsoft OpenXML." In her "expert" opinion the proof that Novell is forking OpenOffice.org is the opening line of the press release:

Novell today announced that the Novell® edition of the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite will now support the Office Open XML format...

I'm not sure she ever read past that line, perhaps to see critical information such as:

The translators will be made available as plug-ins to Novell’s OpenOffice.org product. Novell will release the code to integrate the Open XML format into its product as open source and submit it for inclusion in the OpenOffice.org project.

Nor, did she seem to do any research to see that the "Novell Edition of OpenOffice.org" has existed since the release of Novell Linux Desktop 9, and exists only because we have added functionality that Sun has not yet accepted into the upstream OpenOffice.org. PJ goes on to quip:

The default will be ODF, they claim, but note that the subheading mentions OpenXML instead

Ummmm.... and that means... what? She then goes on a rant about how evil Novell is, and further quips about our corporate tag line. PJ and others seem to be spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) that is often based purely on speculation and ignorance. This can only serve to hurt Linux and open source, and it is sad for me to watch.

However, amidst all this FUD there are quite a few commenters, bloggers and journalists whom inject some much needed reason. For instance, most of the comments on PJ's post point out that there is no indication that Novell is forking OpenOffice.org, that it is not unusual (and is actually common) for a Linux distribution to include a software package that differs from the upstream version, and that the Novell Edition of OpenOffice.org has existed for quite some time.

A longtime user of SUSE Linux (and former Ximian customer), whom bought every version of SUSE Linux since 6.4, wrote me the other day to point out what he found was a disturbing analysis of the Novell/Microsoft agreement. He said he was worried that SUSE Linux would suffer the same fate as Corel Linux, so he was going to make sure he was familiar with another Linux distribution to prepare for that eventuality. Please don't take this as disloyalty. He really is a devoted fan and strong advocate of SUSE Linux, but the "expert analysis" he read lead him to believe his beloved Linux distribution of choice would soon be crushed by the Evil Empire (tm). I wrote a lengthy response to him to hopefully allay his fears and bring some levity to the situation, and today he sent me a link to another article.

http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/nsm/2006/1127nsm2.html

Hi Pete,

The above e-article from network world.com collaborates really well with your previous e-mail nearly word for word.

It is good to see an article that doesn't deride this agreement, and evaluates it on business reasoning. The author also brushes aside the tumult of comments foretelling the demise of Linux at the hands of Novell, and addresses at least some of the comments he feels (and I agree) are unfounded. Good to see some positive comments coming from mainstream press. Now have any of these links made it to Slashdot or digg?

Does it matter if Vista makes an impact?

This should have been posted last week. Forgot to take it out of draft mode. :-/

I just read an article by John Dvorak entitled, "Will Vista make an impact?" It seems the real question is, "...does it really matter?" Dvorak writes this long article about how boring Vista is and how Microsoft really hasn't put much effort into promoting Vista. Then at the end he says, "... Eventually this will settle down and we'll all be using Vista..." Which basically means it doesn't matter how boring Vista is or how much effort Microsoft puts into promoting it. The sad fact is that people will buy it anyway.

What does this say about the computer operating system industry? Because Microsoft has such a stranglehold on the desktop market they have absolutely no motivation to improve their product. It seems they only do so to marginally satisfy their critics that at least they are doing something.

I ran Vista for a couple of days because I wanted to see what great things they had done. Ok, that's a lie.. I wanted to see if it actually ran on my three-year-old laptop. It worked fine, but there was nothing really compelling, and in fact some stuff was just annoying.

Red Hat will not include Mono in RHEL 5

This article was passed along to me by a colleague. Though this is not big news it is one of those "good to know" things. Back in January when the Fedora project first announced they would include Mono and some Mono-based applications, Red Hat said they would not consider using Mono in RHEL. However, if Red Hat wants to include features like desktop-wide search, they need to include Mono. The above mentioned article says, "I think there are other good alternatives for searching." What would that be then? Locate-db? Regular expressions? All kidding aside, I am curious if there are alternative technologies Red Hat may use to fill this void, so if anyone has a suggestion, please leave a comment.

I'm also curious about the statement, "...I wouldn't be surprised to see an equivalent type Tomboy thing to emerge." The argument is that a relatively small application needs a huge amount of infrastructure to run. I'm not going to debate this statement, I'm not a developer and in no position to confirm or deny, but what this demonstrates to me is the OSS community's obsession with forking. "If you don't like some aspect of a project then start a new competing project!" Now, I'm not saying this is never called for (i.e. xorg), but I will say that it is very rarely the solution. Tomboy is becoming a more mature and useful application everyday, and there is no reason to throw all that away and re-invent the wheel. That is just stupid.

Ultimately, I think the most relevant statement is, "We also think the whole Java way to go with Web Services works just fine. Obviously with JBoss we made a strong commitment to that." That is the meat of it. Red Hat invested big time in Java and has always been a big proponent. Now that Java will be open source they can really go whole hog, and bet the farm on Java because it fits into their "open source or nothing" policy. Congratulations, Havoc. ;-)

Pinch me...

When I first heard it today I thought it was a joke. Microsoft and Novell come to an agreement? And Microsoft is going to recommend SUSE Linux Enterprise to their customers!? Apparently, it is all true. I can't help but have a healthy bit of skepticism, but overall I think this is a good thing. Amazing, really, but really good to see. If you read Novell and Microsoft's open letter to the open source community you see that Microsoft will actually pay engineers to work on open source software. They have funded some open source projects before, but afaik they don't pay open source developers. Very tired right now, but will write more tomorrow.

A better open source backup tool

When planning a Linux backup strategy there are a number of options both in open source and from proprietary vendors. However, almost all of them are server-centric. This isn't so surprising, I suppose, considering the server market is much more mature than the desktop market, but Linux on the desktop is become more of a reality with each year.

I have been using a program called Simple Backup. It was created as an Ubuntu project for Google's Summer of Code. It gets the job done, and is pretty good for a project that was started and completed over the summer. However, I think Ubuntu (and other Linux vendors) need to take it a lot further. For instance, when I insert my USB hard drive I should get a notice asking me if I want to start a backup. There should be some built-in intelligence that will not backup the various caches on my system. After I configure (or re-configure) Simple Backup I should be prompted to backup the configuration to somewhere external (web storage, usb, even a floppy). Further if I have never configured Simple Backup before I should be prompted to import the configuration. If I have a system disaster, or I have to re-install, I shouldn't have to go though all the configuration again.

Now that Linux is getting more popular on the desktop we have to be more proactive about protecting our data. This came up for me because I accidentally formatted a partition that had five years worth of data on it (e-mails, contacts, documents, projects...). I was absolutely devastated. I know, I know... I should have had some type of backup, no matter how cumbersome. While I agree, how up to date would that backup be? If I trusted the magic of rsync, would I get the right combinations of command-line arguments and regular expressions? Would I inadvertantly delete something important in an attempt to keep my backups clean and compact? What about the complexity of time stamps and permissions?

My point is that we need to do better. I think Simple Backup is a great start. Now lets build off that.

Oracle can and will hurt Red Hat

I have seen several articles and blogs stating that Oracle could not possibly provide the high level of support that Red Hat provides its customers. These articles and bloggers opine that Oracle will fail horribly. I have to say that I vehemently disagree. Have any of these people talked with any Oracle or Red Hat customers, or read any research from analysts on this topic? It has been known for a long time that Red Hat customers are not very happy with Red Hat support. In addition, it is well known that it is often a bear to deploy Oracle on Linux because the Oracle DB only works with certain versions of the kernel, the system is very volitile on upgrade, and customers are loathe to upgrade unless they have to.

The title of this blog entry is probably a bit too strong, but to say at this stage that Oracle will fail is very premature. Oracle made this move for real reasons, and if they can execute on what they have set out to do they will cause real problems for Red Hat.

Would love to say more on this topic, but will have to leave that for later.

Does it work yet, Does it work yet, Does it work yet?

GNOME has the blog applet that is pretty neat. Anything to get me to blog more is good. ;-) However, the last time I tried it I would not publish to blogger correctly. Haven't tried it in about a year, but we'll see if this works...

Update: Nope. Still doesn't publish the title correctly. :-/ Oh well. Maybe I should look into contributing...

No, it's not from The Onion

Laptops Give Hope to the Homeless

They may not have roofs over their heads, but some homeless people are toting around old laptops and trading tips on the best hot spots. Some are even blogging. Jacob Ogles reports from Fillmore, California.

I found this article with the built-in rss agregator in flock, and I'm blogging on the article with the "Blog" link the aggregator has for each entry.  I automatically adds the quote you see above.  Very cool.

I have to admit that flock is not quite as polished as I thought earlier, but I still think it is relatively stable.  There are a few bugs that I need to report when I get time.  Obviously I have not blogged in a while, and that is because work has gotten pretty crazy.  At this very moment I have someone urgently pinging me on IM to do some testing. :-)

Anyway, the article.... All I can say is, "wtf."  I imagine if I were ever homeless this would probably be me.  I can't afford rent, but darn it I'm not giving up my laptop!!  However, I almost say this in jest.  It just occurred to me though that this is a good argument for city-wide wifi.

Ok, must go.  Going to get into trouble.

Blogged with Flock

Day 3: Flock on Mac and Linux

So this is the third day of using Flock.  Yesterday I installed Flock on my Linux laptop, and it has been working very well.  What I'm surprised to see is that at version 0.7 Flock is performing as well as Firefox 1.5.x.  I'm not sure if they used the Firefox base, and created a different graphical frontend or not.  I have yet to have a crash, though admittedly I probably haven't worked it very hard for the purposes it is intended.

A neat feature I found, but have not had the chance to use yet is this little icon on the right-hand side of the status bar (lives at the very bottom of the browser window) where you can drag both text and images to use later.  Maybe I will try to incorporate that into a blog entry.

Another cool thing I noticed that Macromedia Flash already works.  It wasn't distributed with the product, and it doesn't use the version of Flash already install (afaict).  However, when I went to a Flash-enabled site I received the notice that I was missing a need plugin.  I clicked on
[ Install plugin ], and amazingly it just installed.  Anyone who is used to Mac or Windows will say, "...so what..."  However, this was on Linux.  Often what you get on Linux with a "new" web browser is "There is no plugin available..."  So to have it work flawlessly was a thing of beauty. ;-)

One thing that annoys me is that the search bar uses Yahoo! Search by default.  I like Google, and would rather have that be the default.  I can click on a drop-down and choose to do the same search with Google, but it is just another step.  I will look to see if I can change the default.  Yahoo! seems to be rather prominent in this product, and I wonder if that means Yahoo! is somehow funding or contributing to this project.  It would make sense.

Need to get back to work.  I really like this blog tool. :-)

Blogged with Flock

Software Junkie

I am such a software Junkie.  And, admittedly, a big fan of the Mozilla Foundation.  I'm trying out the Flock web browser.  I saw something about this before, but never really bothered to download and install it.  Often I will checking stuff like this out to see what advantages it may give me or any new features, and often I am disappointed.

For instance, I tried Seamonkey, and found it to be nothing more than a re-birth of the Mozilla project and the Netscape browser (maybe that is a bit harsh).  Flock, however, seems to actually have a different purpose and a different audience.  It is the browser for the constant Internet junkie.  I can't say I'm an avid blogger (as is obvious) or that I share my photos with the world on Fliker (because my photos largely suck), but that is often because it is just to much of a PITA.  There are some neat tools you can find about, but Flock seems to nicely integrate these tools, and make it easy.

So, as the software junkie that I am, I am trying it out.  So far it is neat, but I will have to reserve judgment for a week or so.  I guess we'll know if the blogging feature is that easy if I manage to blog more. ;-)

Blogged with Flock