Linux Foundation Weblogs

Amanda McPherson: SaaS, Open Source and the Migration of Burden

Thu, 08 May 2008 14:06:52 +0000

Last week, I recorded a podcast with Dennis Byron, analyst at eBizQ. Dennis wanted to talk about how open source is the fundamental enabler of Software as a Service, an idea he started writing about after a conversation with some guy named Jim Zemlin.

I was happy to talk about this with Dennis because I think it’s an under-the-radar topic. Just the week before I had a reporter ask me how Linux is going to deal with the threat of cloud computing. The threat? I told her that virtually all of the major cloud computing initiatives (except Microsoft’s) are built on Linux. (There is a potential displacement there for Linux distribution vendors but that’s another topic.) Linux as a platform is the enabling backbone of software as a service and cloud computing.

Recently, Bernard Golden at CIO Magazine wrote a very interesting article on the “migration of margin” in the software industry. He say that in the future there will be no open source Bill Gates or Larry Ellisons, meaning there will be no open source billionaires. But that there will be plenty of billionaires built on the backs of open source. Namely they will be the founders of these software as a service companies like Google and Facebook today and similar companies tomorrow.

Is this a problem? (Well, some of my friends at software start ups may say yes, but not me since I work for a non-profit. ) Seriously, no, I don’t think so. As Matt Asay so adroitly says, open source eliminates the vendor lock in that created the enormous margins of the proprietary software world. It has eliminated the terrible inefficiencies created by companies competing and trying to differentiate on platform components that should be commodities. Now they collaborate, as they do with Linux. So just as the margin has migrated, I would say so has the development burden. Just as we use pooled money in the form of taxes to create roads or airports, you want to share the development costs of your computing infrastructure, in this case the operating system. Open source makes starting a software company so much easier today.

Do you think Google could have built their business without Linux? I believe there has been more wealth created via Linux at Google than anywhere else. At the beginning, they could add 10,000 $1,000 no name servers at a time as they grew instead of needing a half million dollar investment. When you’re starting out, this is crucial. Open source is the enabler of these new companies’ innovation since it allows you to grow incrementally when you’re still trying to figure out your business

Google, Paypal, Amazon and others were able to build a mesh of low cost Linux servers from the lowest priced vendors. I’ve worked at software start ups before Linux and the cost of building out at the data center with expensive Sun hardware and software (back before the .com bust) made the cost of entry so high, very few companies could innovate and build the products they wanted to build without burning through millions of dollars. Then you had to go pay a lot of expensive sales people to sell it.

If Amazon had to pay a large amount of money for the foundational components of EC2, they couldn’t make it make sense economically for these small developers. The cost would be so high only very well funded companies could afford to use it. (Here I question just how much margin has migrated to something like Amazon’s EC2 network as the costs are pretty low.) Open source brings that barrier to entry so low we are seeing a burst of innovation. But the question remains: do people see this as a “free rider” problem where companies build wealth from free software without giving enough back?

Open Voices: Open Voices with Edward Screven of Oracle

lfblogs@linux-foundation.org — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:06:43 +0000

This Open Voices installment features Edward Screven, Chief Corporate Architect of Oracle who sits down with Jim Zemlin to discuss Oracle’s current and future market positioning, as well as his thoughts on a variety of topics, from cloud computing to a single Linux distribution. If you’d rather not listen, you can read the transcript here.

This Open Voices installment features Edward Screven, Chief Corporate Architect of Oracle who sits down with Jim Zemlin to discuss Oracle's current and future market positioning, as well as his thoughts on a variety of topics, from cloud computing to a single Linux distribution. If you'd rather not listen, you can read the transcript here.

Linux Weather Forecast: The shape of 2.6.26

Mon, 05 May 2008 20:47:11 +0000

On May 3, Linus announced the release of the 2.6.26-rc1 prepatch and the closure of the merge window for this development cycle. So now we know what will be in 2.6.26, which, I predict, will be released sometime around the beginning of July.

Many developers will be pleased by the addition of the KGDB debugger for the x86 architecture at last. For as long as I have been following Linux development, Linus has opposed interactive debuggers; he fears that they cause developers to look at symptoms and miss the true causes of bugs. After all this time, a dedicated group of developers was able to put together a version of KGDB that Linus could stand, though, and so in it went. The merged version lacks some useful features, such as KGDB-over-ethernet, but those can be obtained with external patches and, with luck, will make it into the mainline sometime in the future.

When the OLPC folks made mesh networking work on the XO laptop, they put the bulk of the code into the “Libertas” driver for the XO’s Marvell-based network chip. That code ran into difficulties at merge time because the networking developers thought that the mesh features should be implemented at a higher level where they would be useful for a wider range of devices. So Libertas was merged without mesh networking. Now, though, a more generic mesh networking implementation has found its way into the mac80211 layer. That, too, will be part of 2.6.26.

Other nice features include page attribute table (PAT) support, which should help ease a number of hardware-related hassles. There’s a braille screen reader layer. A lot of containers work has gone in, pushing that capability closer to completion. And so on.

But one thing that is notable about this cycle is that it is relatively small. 2.6.25 finished out at over 12,000 individual changes; 2.6.26, at this point, has some 7500. It would appear that, after two cycles of intensive merging, the developers are slowing down just a little bit. So there’s rather fewer new features this time around. That may lead to a shorter development cycle for 2.6.26 and, perhaps, fewer problems to fix on the way there.

Ted Tso: Donald Knuth: “I trust my family jewels only to Linux”

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 01:02:37 +0000

Andrew Binstock interviewed Donald Knuth recently, and one of the more amusing tidbits was this:

I currently use Ubuntu Linux, on a standalone laptop—it has no Internet connection. I occasionally carry flash memory drives between this machine and the Macs that I use for network surfing and graphics; but I trust my family jewels only to Linux.

More seriously, I found his comments about about multi-core computers to be very interesting:

I might as well flame a bit about my personal unhappiness with the current trend toward multicore architecture. To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas, and that they’re trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore’s Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks! I won’t be surprised at all if the whole multithreading idea turns out to be a flop, worse than the “Itanium” approach that was supposed to be so terrific—until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write.

Let me put it this way: During the past 50 years, I’ve written well over a thousand programs, many of which have substantial size. I can’t think of even five of those programs that would have been enhanced noticeably by parallelism or multithreading. Surely, for example, multiple processors are no help to TeX….

I know that important applications for parallelism exist—rendering graphics, breaking codes, scanning images, simulating physical and biological processes, etc. But all these applications require dedicated code and special-purpose techniques, which will need to be changed substantially every few years.

This is a very interesting issue, because it raises the question of what next-generation CPU’s need to do in order to be successful. Given that it is no longer possible to just double the clock frequency every 18 months, should CPU architects just start doubling the number of cores every 18 months instead? Or should they try to concentrate a lot more computing power into an individual core, and optimize for a fast and dense interconnect between the CPU’s? The latter is much more difficult, and the advantage of doing the first is that it’s really easy for marketing types to use some cheesy benchmark such as SPECint to help sell the chip, but then people find out that it’s not very useful in real life.

Why? Because programmers have proven that they have a huge amount of trouble writing programs that take advantage of these very large multicore computers. Ultimately, I suspect that we will need a radically different way of programming in order to take advantage of these systems, and perhaps a totally new programming language before we will be able to use them.

Professor Knuth is highly dubious that the later approach will work, and while I hope he’s wrong (since I suspect the hardware designers are starting to run out of ideas, so it’s time software engineers started doing some innovating), he’s a pretty smart guy, and he may well be right. Of course, another question is whether what would we do with all of that computing power? Whatever happened to the predictions that computers would be able to support voice or visual recognition? And of course, what about the power and cooling issues for these super-high-powered chips? All I can say is, the next couple of years is going to be interesting, as we try to sort out all of these issues.

Andy Updegrove: Rambus Ruling Overturned: A Legal Dispute of Dickensian Proportions Lurches On

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 13:21:06 +0000

The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Charles Dickens, Bleak House

According to John the Apostle, the poor will be always with us. So too, it seems, will the never-ending skein of cases enmeshing Rambus, Inc., the brash memory design company that famously participated in a JEDEC standard setting process in the early 1990s, and later asserted various patent claims against implementers of the very standards created by the working group in which it participated. And while the lawyers may not be to blame in this case (or more properly, these many cases), the flood of litigation involving more than a half a dozen different vendors and government agencies certainly rivals the worst that Jardyce ever threw against Jardyce in Charles Dickens’ epic tale of litigation gone wild.

The latest turning of the screw was announced this Tuesday, when the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia overturned a unanimous ruling by the five Commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission (who had, in their own turn, earlier overturned the decision of an FTC Administrative Law Judge, who had reached a similar result to the Circuit Court of Appeals, which had itself earlier overturned the verdict of a trial court that…well, you get the idea). In a related decision, the FTC had capped the royalties that Rambus could require implementers of the standards to pay. Now that Jill, too, will go tumbling down after the Jack that fell to the Appeals Court’s reinterpretation of the law.

The long and the short of the latest decision is that the Court of Appeals disagreed with the FTC’s conclusion that Rambus’s activities in JEDEC constituted a violation of antitrust law, and also questioned whether the Commissioners had properly concluded that Rambus had violated JEDEC’s patent disclosure policy. Summarizing and oversimplifying a complex analysis, the FTC had based its conclusions on the assumption that if Rambus had disclosed its patentable inventions in timely fashion, JEDEC would have either chosen another, non-infringing option, or would have required Rambus (under its standing rules) to pledge to make patent licenses available on reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) terms. The higher court held that under existing precedents, both of these alternatives would need to result in a violation of antitrust laws in order for Rambus to be held accountable .

Fortunately for Rambus, the court held that engaging in deceptive conduct to avoid the latter alternative would not violate anticompetition law, even where the result was to create monopoly power. Or, in the more formalistic language of the Court, “the FTC failed to demonstrate that Rambus’s conduct was exclusionary under settled principles of antitrust law”.

Read more

Ted Tso: Organic vs. Non-Organic Open Source, Revisited

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 04:21:49 +0000

There’s been some controversy generated over my use of the terminology of “Organic” and “Non-Organic” Open Source. Asa Dotzler noted that it wasn’t Mozilla’s original intent to “make a distinction between how Mozilla does open source and how others do open source”. Nessance complained that he didn’t like the term “Non-Organic”, because it was “raw and vague - is it alien, poison, silicon-based?” and suggested instead the term “Synthetic Open Source”, referencing a paper by Siobhán O’Mahony, ” What makes a project open source? Migrating from organic to synthetic communities”. Nessance referenced a series of questions and answers by Stephen O’ Grady from Red Monk, where he claimed the distinction between the two doesn’t matter. (Although given that Sun is a paying customer of Red Monk, Stephen admits that this might have influenced his thinking and so he might be “brainwashed” :-).

So let’s take some of these issues in reverse order. Does the distinction matter? After all, if the distinction doesn’t matter, then there’s no reason to create or define specialized terminology to describe the difference. Certainly, Brian Aker, a senior technologist from MySQL, thinks it does, as do folks like me and Amanda McPherson and Mike Dolan; but does it really? Are we just saying that because we want to take a cheap shot at Sun?

Well, to answer that, let’s go back and ask the question, “Why is Open Source a good thing in the first place?” It’s gotten to the point where people just assume that it’s a good thing, because everybody says it is. But if we go back to first principals maybe it will become much clearer why this dinction is so important.

Consider the Apache web server; it was able to completely dominate the web server market, easily besting all of its proprietary competitors, including the super-deep-pocketed Microsoft. Why? It won because a large number of volunteers were able to collaborate together to create a very fully featured product, using a “stone soup” model where each developer “scratched their own itch”. Many, if not most, of these volunteers were compensated by their employers for their work. Since their employers were not in the web server business, but instead needed a web server as means (a critical means, to be sure) to pursue their business, there was no economic reason not to let their engineers contribute their improvements back to the Apache project. Indeed, it was cheaper to let their engineers work on Apache collaboratively than it was to purchase a product that would be less suited for their needs. In other words, it was a collective “build vs. buy” decision, with the twist that because a large number of companies were involved in the collaboration, it was far, far cheaper than the traditional “build” option. This is a powerful model, and the fact that Sun originally asked Roy Felding from the Apache Foundation to assist in forming the Solaris community indicates that at least some people in Sun appreciated why this was so important.

There are other benefits of having code released under the Open Source license, such as the ability for others to see the implementation details of your operating system — but in truth, Sun had already made the Source Code for Solaris available for a nominal fee years before. And, of course, there are plenty of arguments over the exact licensing terms that should be used, such as GPLv2, GPLv3, CDDL, the CPL, MPL, etc., but sometimes those arguments can be a distraction from the central issue. While the legal issues that arise from the choice of license are important, at the end of the day, the most crucial issue is the development community. It is the strength and the diversity of the development community which is the best indicator for the health and the well-being of an Open Source project.

But what about end-users, I hear people cry? End users are important, to the extent that they provide ego-strokes to the developers, and to the extent that they provide testing and bug reports to the developers, and to the extent that they provide an economic justification to companies who employ open source developers to continue to do so. But ultimately, the effects of end-users on an open source project is only in a very indirect way.

Moreover, if you ask commercial end users what they value about Open Source, a survey by Computer Economics indicated that the number one reason why customers valued open source was “reduced dependence on software vendors”, which end users valued 2 to 1 over “lower total cost of ownership”. (Which is why Sun Salescritters who were sending around TCO analysis comparing 24×7 phone support form Red Hat with Support-by-email from Sun totally missed the point.) What’s important to commercial end users is that they be able to avoid the effects of vendor lock-in, which implies that if all of the developers are employed by one vendor, it doesn’t provide the value the end users were looking for.

This is why whether a project’s developers are dominated by employees from a single company is so important. The license under which the code is released is merely just the outward trappings of an open source project. What’s really critical is the extent to which the development costs are shared across a vast global community of developers who have many different means of support. This saves costs to the companies who are using a product being developed in such a fashion; it gives choice to customers about whether they can get their support from company A or company B; programmers who don’t like the way things are going at one company have an easier time changing jobs while still working on the same project; it’s a win-win-win scenario.

In contrast, if a project decides to release its code under an open source license, but nearly all the developers remain employed by a single company, it doesn’t really change the dynamic compared to when the project was previously under a closed-source license. It is a necessary but not sufficient step towards attracting outside contributors, and eventually migrating towards having a true open source development community. But if those further steps are not taken, the hopes that users will think that some project is “cool” because it is under an open-source license will ultimately be in vain. The “Generation Y”/Millennial Generation in particular are very sensitive indeed to Astroturfing-style marketing tactics.

Ok, so this is why the distinction matters. Given that it does, what terms shall we use? I still like “Organic” vs “Non-organic”. While it may not have been intended by the Mozilla Foundation, the description in their web page, “only a small percentage of whom are actual employees [of the Mozilla Foundation]“, is very much what I and others have been trying to describe. And while I originally used the description “Projects which have an Open Source Development Community” vs “Projects with an Open Source License but which are dominated by employees from a single company”, I think we can all agree these are very awkward. We need a better shorthand.

When Brian Aker from MySQL suggested “Organic” vs “Non-Organic” Open Source, and I think those terms work well. If some folks think that “Non-Organic” is somehow pejorative (hey, at least we didn’t say “genetically modified Open Source” :-), I suppose we could use Synthetic Open Source. I’m not really convinced that is any much more appetizing, myself, however.

So what would be better terms to use? Please give me some suggestions, and maybe we can come up with a better set of words that everyone is happy with.

Amanda McPherson: Open Source and Career Advancement

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:20:11 +0000

In the past I have done media interviews with reporters who question if open source is good for a developers career. Basically they have the outdated notion that open source is for hobbyists and time off from “real jobs.” In reality, open source developers are much in demand. The kernel developers I know certainly have no shortage of job opportunities. Why?

Open source (especially platform software like Linux) is used in more and more companies, in more and more uses. Check out the Linux Kernel Development paper to see a long list. Because it’s open source you have a multitude of companies tied to the product and its success. In the Linux world, the platform is used by companies in the desktop, server and embedded markets. A member of the Linux community is not tied into one company since his or her skills or transferable to all of the companies who use Linux. This is in contrast to jobs in the proprietary worlds. If you’re a Zune developer, you certainly have transferable software development skills to another similar project. (Languages are languages after all.) Yet the value of your specialized knowledge and experience is of much more use to Microsoft than anyone else. That means you, as a worker, have less leverage and are more at the mercy of internal project politics specific to that company. (Unfortunately it shouldn’t work this way, but we all know that companies are generally not quick to reward good employees unless someone else may take them.)

Open source projects are not immune to politics, don’t get me wrong, but there is one key difference: transparency. Because your work is in the open, it’s the best way to market your skills. Esther Shindler, editor at CIO Magazine, has a great article on this topic. She says:

Sometimes, there isn’t much you can do to kick-start your career. Not everyone can be lucky enough to get involved in a high-profile project at work, or to develop a talent in a technology that’s suddenly in-demand. But it surprises me when IT professionals who aim to move up the career ladders don’t take advantage of one resource that’s a win-win solution all around: get involved in an open source project.

This is particularly important to women in IT, who can feel that it’s hard to get noticed in their companies (see The Executive Woman’s Guide to Self-Promotion for general guidelines on how to counter that problem). But it really applies to anyone who wants to gain experience and visibility in the IT department, even if you don’t care about becoming a rock star.

As a participant in an open source project, everything is in your control. You pick the project that you think is the most valuable, or in which you can develop the skills you need but can’t justify on your résumé. In the universe of open source, you’re judged only by what you contribute. Corporate politics aren’t an issue. If your code is useful, or your technical documentation is appreciated, or you’re just a welcoming voice on the community IRC channel, you have a good chance of being invited to become a committer.

I think there is a shortage of great open source developers. Women, especially, should see this as a great opportunity for their career and get involved with Linux or other open source.

Ted Tso: Links — 2008-04-25

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:57:48 +0000

The Open Source Commands: Really good ideas that companies should take to heart.
Open Source Commandments II: Passover Penguins: More really good ideas, especially for companies like Sun…
Did Canonical Just Get Punked by Red Hat and Novell?: Interesting thoughts about Linux desktop strategies
rPath to OEM SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell for Appliances: I know a bunch of the folks at rPath, and I very much respect their technology; I think this is a very good thing for them.
Does Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer need an intervention?: Does anyone think a Microsoft/Yahoo merger makes sense besides Mr. Ballmer?

Enterprise Kernel Log: Ubuntu 8.04 LTS released

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 08:37:47 +0000

The latest version of Ubuntu Linux, 8.04 has been released. “Hardy Heron” is the first release with Long Term Support release since two years: Ubuntu sponsor Canonical garantees three years of updates for the desktop version and five years for the server version. The unusually long support for a Linux distribution that can be downloaded for free, together with the support offerings by Canonical, makes Ubuntu 8.04 also attractive for the enterprise world. Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth hopes that the new version of Ubuntu will become a serious competitor to Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Sun already offers some of its servers with Ubuntu preinstalled.

Like the previous LTS version Ubuntu 6.06, “Hardy Heron” puts a stronger focus on stability and ease of use than on new features. Despite this it does include quite a few changes: A new installer allows Ubuntu to be installed directly under Windows without having to boot from CD or re-partition the hard disk. Several desktop tools like the Brasero burner have been added or improved and there’s a new security feature called PolicyKit. Ubuntu 8.04 is the first Linux distribution to install the new Firefox 3 as its default browser.

A review of Ubuntu 8.04 can be found here.

Ted Tso: Organic vs. Non-organic Open Source

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:24:20 +0000

Brian Aker dropped by and replied to my previous essay by making the following comment:

I believe you are hitting the nail on the “organic” vs “nonorganic” open source. I do not believe we have a model for going from one to the other. Linux and Apache both have very different models for contribution… but I don’t believe either are really optimized at this point.

Optimization to me would lead to a system of “less priests” and more inclusion.

I made an initial reply as comment, and then decided it was so long that I should promote it to a top-level post.

I assume that when Brian talks about “organic open source” what he means is what I was calling an “open source development community”. Some googling turned up the following definition from Mozilla Firefox’s organic software page: “Our most well-known product, Firefox, is created by an international movement of thousands, only a small percentage of whom are actual employees.”

This puts it in contrast with “non-organic” software, where all or nearly all of the developers are employed by one company. (And anyone who proves talented at adding features to that source base soon gets a job offer by that one company. By that definition we can certainly see projects like Wine, Mysql, Ghostscript (at one time), and others as fitting into that model, and being quite successful. There’s nothing really wrong with the non-organic software model, although many of them have struggled to make enough money when competing with pure proprietary softare competitors, with MySQL perhaps being the exception which proves the rule.

In most of these cases, though, the project started more as an organic open source, and then transitioned into the non-organic model when there was a desire to monetize the project — and/or when the open source programmers decided that it would be nice if they could turn their avocation into a vocation, and let their hobby put food on the family table.

Solaris, of course, is doing something else quite different, though. They are trying to make the transition from a proprietary customer/supplier relationship to trying to develop an Open Source community — and what John’s candidate statement pointed out is that they weren’t really interested in creating an organic open source developer community at all, but they wanted the fruits of an open source community — with plenty of application developers, end-users, etc., all participating in that community.

We don’t have a lot of precedent for projects who try to go in this direction, but I suspect they are skipping a step when they try to go to the end step without bothering to try to make themselves open to outside developers. And by continuing to act like a corporation, they end up shooting themselves in the foot. For example, the OpenSolaris license still prohibits people from publishing benchmarks or comparisons with other operating systems. Very common in closed-source operating systems and databases, but it discourages people from even trying to make things better, both within and outside of the Open Solaris core team. Instead, they respond to posts like David Miller’s with “Have you ever kissed a girl?”. (Thanks, Simon, for that quote; I had seen it before, but not for a while, and it pretty well sums up the sheer arrogance of the Open Solaris development team.)

So while Linux may not be completely optimized in terms of “less priests” and more inclusion, at least over 1200 developers contributed to 2.6.25 during its development cycle. Compared to that, Open Solaris is positively dominated by “high priests” and with a “you may not touch the holy-of-holies” attitude; heck, they won’t even allow you to compare them to other religions without branding you a heretic and suing you for licensing violations!