Linux Solutions

IBM’s VP of open source, Bob Sutor, has urged open source developers to “stop copying windows 2001”, and has asked that developers try to go “green”, if they ever want to see Linux on the desktop.

Sutor was speaking at the LinuxWorld Conference in San Francisco, and believes that for Linux to be accepted by consumers and business, open source developers should bring in “some really good graphic designers”.

Sutors comments came a day after IBM announced at the show that it was joining Linux distributors Novell, red Hat and Canonical in building Microsoft-free PCs for business. The four companies agreed to provide hardware partners with the software to build desktops that would have alternatives to Windows and Office.

IBM’s comment to the Linux community carry’s a lot of weight, given the massive investment and contribution the company has made to the OS. IBM stood behind Linux way back in December 2000, when they promised to spend $1bn on the development of the OS the following year.

Among the things Sutor spoke of, was that developers should focus on making the OS more ‘green’. Linux, he believes, has got to be more efficient in its use of resources to help reduce energy consumption in the data centre. Even though server virtualisation, load balancing, better resource management and other technologies make the OS efficient today, he believes, “there’s got to be more”.

“I’ve got this lingering feeling that open source has not done enough,” Sutor said, noting that the community hasn’t thought hard enough about how to make Linux even more efficient. We’re doing the obvious things,” he said.

In the long term, IBM expects SMB technology to evolve into products that combine open source and proprietary technologies, as well as web services.

IBM also feels that there is an opportunity for the open source community to build industry-specific applications that would run on Linux. Sutor said he is “tired of waiting” for this type of software to arrive.

“We’re very positive about the future of Linux,” Sutor said. “We’re not going to slack off.”

Mozilla as announced its new Mozilla Labs Concept Series which is intended to get users involved in the development of the online experience. You don’t need to be a programmer either. Mozilla are looking for people from both side of the net using community. That’s; Those who point and click, and laugh at a back-flipping dog on YouTube, and those who write the programs that allow the dog flipping-watchers to watch the dog flipping.

Chris Beard, vice president and general manager of Mozilla Labs, spoke about why he wanted to open the floodgates to everyone: “We’re hoping to lower the barrier to participation by providing a forum for surfacing, sharing and collaborating on new ideas and concepts. Our goal is to bring even more people to the table and provoke thought, facilitate discussion and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project and the Web as a whole.”

The Concept Series see’s the debut of the Aurora browser, and a mobile version of the Firefox browser.

Aurora, built with the assistance of Adaptive Path, allows users to manipulate their browser with the hand curser, by way of simple drag and drop. The browser interface is totally hidden until the user brings it up using a radial menu or with the frame.

Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla said: “In developing the mobile Firefox browser, Fennec, the focus will be on the user experience. When typing is tough and screens are small, interaction and presentation count.”

The software is being designed for touch screen with multi-touch functionality which will enable direct manipulation of interfaces.

“As with most Mozilla projects, we’re developing the concept in the open and hope to see the idea and process evolve with the wider participation of the global community of collaborators. If the early response is indication, we’ll certainly have more to share over the coming weeks and months,” Beard said.

If you want to be involved in the project, users need to categorise their input as Ideas, Mock-ups or as Prototypes.

Mozilla want you to submit ideas even if it’s “a sentence, paragraph, or even bullet-points [to] kick-start the process. Ideas can be simple and non-technical. It should be easy for anyone and everyone to help shape the future of the Web. So throw your notions, inspirations, dreams and visions out to the community,” beard said.

If you have an image, sketch or video, you should submit your scribbling’s in to the Mock-ups category. A Prototype should be an operational concept: Something that users can feel, touch and play around with.

Mozilla also requests that concepts and related source materials are freely re-distributable and re-mixable under either a Creative Commons License or the Mozilla Public License.

Ever the easy target, Microsoft was on the receiving end of an IBM cannonade at this year’s LinuxWorld Conference and Expo.

IBM started off by warming the crowd with a reminder that highlighted its first decade of support of the open source community, and then discussing plans for the next decade. The company did not say what laid in store for 2018, but said that the focus is on the next few years anyway.

The first announcement from IBM was the news that it is contributing a package of open source software for supercomputers that run on Linux. The package includes the Extreme Cluster Administration Toolkit, which runs on Roadrunner, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The second announcement is that IBM is looking to target the small to medium-sized business market with Linux-based software appliances. The plan includes offering service-based apps that target business function, and to pre-install Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Server in Lotus Foundations. Currently the market is dominated by Microsoft Exchange Server.

Jeff Smith, IBM’s vice president for Linux and Open Source said: “We believe that it’ll present a very compelling alternative and bring openness to the world of small business, which has not historically been true. The client side of the IT environment is one the last bastions of proprietary technology. It has been disproportionately dominated by one vendor.”

Other announcements included increasing support for real-time Linux and an updated version of WebSphere Application Server Community Edition, which is based on Apache’s Geronimo project.

Inna Kuznetsova, IBM’s director of Linux Strategy believes that several factors have prevented the mainstream adoption of Linux. She believes that ease of use and a lack of available apps are to blame.

“We see Linux as the mainstream of business today,” Kuznetsova said. “It’s only a matter of time until it also becomes the mainstream in the home as well. I can hardly name an area where we need more choice,” she said.

With Firefox 3.1 now available in test builds, it would appear as though Mozilla is making a move toward open Web standards. Something to help that push will be the inclusion of the Ogg Theora video codec that the company revealed at its summit in British Columbia last week.

By using the Ogg Theora codec, users will no longer have to download plug-ins or use Javascript to play Theora video content. Not as widely used as Adobe’s Flash Player, Theora is found on sites like Wikimedia Commons.

Opera browser already uses Ogg Theora, and while it’s a baby step, Mozilla’s developers see the move as a long over-due step in the right direction.

Mozilla engineer Chris Double wrote on his blog: “This original commit is a work in progress. There are unimplemented bits, bugs, etc. that need to be sorted out. But it’s a start towards using a common codec across all platforms and will improve as we get towards the 3.1 release.”

Because of the integration, HTML tags will allow developers to directly embed Ogg content. The open source community is already in support of the change.

Ben McIlwain, an IT consultant and free software project contributor, said: “The Web has faced fragmented video standards for over a decade now. Imagine if image standards had been this poorly supported.”

“Everyone’s experienced broken video support, whether it be a Flash plug-in that crashes an unsupported browser,” he said. “If these things were to just work, that would be a huge improvement in the browsing experience. We will have the same user experience with videos and other multimedia that we currently have with images.”

The idea that there will be an industry video standard is a bit of a fairy tail. Ogg Theora’s integration, however, could signal the start of a change.

“There’s the official standards, then the kind of force-of-nature standards,” Navica CEO Bernard Golden said. “You get this tipping point - ‘most people use it, so I want to use it’ kind of thing.”

To say large company’s like Apple will want to steer away from their own video format is a bit preposterous, but Golden believes that the open source community has more power than it realises.

“Eventually, [the platform] represents a significant point - and then, all of a sudden, stuff that’s proprietary looks kind of stranded and obsolete,” Golden commented. “It’s not like some magic is going to happen. These kind of things tend to move over time, kind of like the Firefox browser itself,” he added.

Microsoft could be the first to change Mcllwain reckons, because of the company’s history with the Ogg format.

“It’s not like Microsoft hasn’t used Ogg in the past. The ‘Halo’ games for PC used Ogg Vorbis for all of their music, for instance,” McIlwain noted.

“It’s Apple and Nokia who stand to lose the most. They make money every time a proprietary codec is used,” he added.

For all the users out there, the best change could be no change at all.

“One would hope they wouldn’t see a change,” Navica’s Golden said. “It would just be present and work and they wouldn’t have to fuss about it. That’s the end goal for open source,” he said.

Once a closed-door, mobile development, it would seem, is out in the open. In the last couple of years mobile software developers have been turning to the open source community for inspiration.

Google has toyed with us over its Android platform, with Andy Rubin, director of mobile platforms claiming: “[Android is] the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices”. Google leads the Open Handset Alliance, and has drawn together dozens of companies to work on the OS. The LiMo Foundation, formed last year and have already successfully pushed the Linux open source OS on to phones.

Most recently, Nokia announced that it had bought up the rest of the Symbian software effort that they didn’t own previously, and opened it up to device makers.

Now with so much competition, many in the wireless industry are questioning just how much we need all these separate software efforts and whether they can/want to work together. “We are all doing the right thing,” Rubin says. “I don’t think there’s anything that would preclude us from working together. How we cooperate - that’s the question.” Rubin also says he’s willing to host a meeting among “everybody that’s interested.”

Open source efforts might be able to accomplish a lot more together than they can apart, analysts say. “Concerns over the reliability and lack of focus for any one initiative sends some handset makers into the arms of proprietary software makers Microsoft Research In Motion and Apple,” says Kevin Burden, an analyst at ABI Research. “The concern is that open-source initiatives are a rattly ship, [where] there’s no control over where these platforms are going,” Burden says.

Google’s Rubin is not alone in wanting to work with other organisations. At a recent Tokyo conference, Symbian CEEO Nigel Clifford hinted that he’d be open to a collaboration with Google in some way. LiMo’s executive director, Morgan Gillis, says he wouldn’t mid working with Android either. “There’s plenty of scope for cooperation,” he says.

Is it likely that we could ever see a merger between any of these firms?

Jack Gold, president of consulting firm J. Gold Associates, has speculated that LiMo or Symbian may consider merging with Android. “The problem right now is there are too many [open source] players,” Gold says. “It doesn’t make sense in a marketplace to have multiple vendors doing the same thing. If you combine all that effort into one, you should have a lot more effect.”

However, the notion of a merger between Symbian and Android is widely dismissed within Symbian circles. “It might be more feasible for Android to merge with LiMo than with Symbian, because the technology underpinnings are the same,” Gillis says. He also says the two haven’t discussed closer collaboration, much less a merger.

But in the interest of healthy competition, a merger is unlikely.

“It is like suggesting that Coke and Pepsi merge,” says Ben Wood, an analyst at the British mobile consulting firm CCS Insight. “There are clear competitive reasons why Nokia, which owns all the intellectual property and will be the biggest contributor to the [open source] Symbian Foundation, has no commercial incentive at all to work with Google.”

For its part, Google is pressing ahead with stand-alone Android efforts. “We will continue building and innovating on Android,” says Rubin, who declined to comment on whether Android may merge with another open source effort.

For now, Microsoft says it’s not worried. “This is really nothing new, we’ve seen Linux consortiums come and go,” says Scott Rockfeld, group product manager of Windows Mobile. But even a little cooperation could make these recent open efforts more than just some passing fad.

Alfresco Software has announced Alfresco Labs version 3, an open source alternative to Microsoft’s enterprise content management (ECM) software SharePoint.

Previously called the “Alfresco Community”, Alfresco Labs 3 offers users the first open source fully compatible SharePoint repository. With Alfresco Labs 3, companies can leverage existing investments in Linux, JAVA as wet as .NET to significantly reduce their SharePoint total cost of ownership and maximize their hardware and software investments, according to Alfresco.

“This product upgrade is a good example of how we are using judo against much larger and more established players in the market. We are attacking one of the last Microsoft strangle holds,” John Powell, CEO of Alfresco, said

The Alfresco Labs 3 repository offers three main features. First of all it supports the Microsoft SharePoint protocol. Secondly, it does not require client installation, and thirdly it’s a highly scalable ECM platform. The repository has been independently tested with over 100 million documents, according to the company.

“The Alfresco Labs’ version 3 is designed to be a research community lab for new features, enabling developers to access a nightly build with the latest functionality,” added Powell.

Alfresco sees this new release as a cost-cutting measure that provides all the functionality of SharePoint. The shift in how information and content is shared and created is forcing enterprises to blur the lines between enterprise content management (ECM) and social software.

The aim of the development is to allow “enterprise employees to access content everywhere, not just in large monolithic applications. ECM software is commonly used in Fortune 1,000 companies, but it’s only seen in about 5 to 10 percent of smaller enterprises,” Powell said.

“Workers in these smaller environments prefer to use shared file drives or e-mail. As a result, products that offer basic content services like Alfresco Software and SharePoint position themselves to fill this gap,” he added.

“Alfresco Labs 3 is the first product to implement the SharePoint protocol and provides the same ease-of-use of SharePoint while giving companies the freedom of choice in their hardware, database, operating system, application server and portal products,” said John Newton, CTO of Alfresco Software.

“Alfresco Labs users get a content management and collaboration tool that is integrated with Microsoft SharePoint and Office. It lowers overall IT costs and increases return on existing investments,” he said.

“The added functionality in Alfresco Labs 3 reflects a major engineering effort for the company,” noted Powell. “It provides a new level of social computing functionality. The SharePoint emulation was a small yet critical part of the overall product upgrade,” Powell said.

“Microsoft provided much better documentation due to the demands of the European Union,” he said. “It gives users options for a complete alternative system.”

“Microsoft released the SharePoint protocol as part of its compliance with the EU’s antitrust decision of March 24, 2004. Alfresco also is the first ECM system to implement the Microsoft Office protocols as a compatible server,” said Newton