Linux Solutions

Android made its first appearance last week in the form of the new G1, causing the geeky portion of the general public to get excited, and the developers to get their panties in a twist. Blogs all over the web have been talking about how cool the new platform is, but for a basic user, its just a fancy new phone, however, if you are a developer then you want to know what you can, and perhaps more appropriately, can’t do with this new toy.

Last week Apple began applying nondisclosure agreements to rejection letters sent to those developing for the App store. This means that developers are not allowed to reveal why they were rejected.

Techie bloggers have been condemning the iPhone to a gradual death. One blogger, Thomas Teisberg from Linux Loop, said:

“As of today’s news, it appears that the iPhone development process is like this.”

“Ask Apple for permission to make an application. Sign a non-disclosure agreement. Invest time and money into an iPhone application. Ask Apple for permission to sell or give away your application. If Apple says YES: start making money and hope Apple does not change their minds. If Apple says NO: shut up and deal with it. If you say anything, Apple can sue you, further raising the wasted investment money.”

As a result, “the iPhone is now doomed,” Teisberg claims.

“Apple has not shot itself in the foot — they shot themselves in the leg or heart,” Teisberg added. “If Apple does not loosen up on their NDA policies soon, developers may leave the iPhone for the much more open Android platform or another more open platform.”

If that happens, “Apple has suddenly doomed a potentially promising and incredibly successful platform,” he said. “The only question that remains to be seen is how far iPhone developers are willing to be pushed? My guess: not much more.”

Slashdot editor Timothy Lord shed some light on the debacle.

“I’m optimistic about Android, and the ham-fisted way that Apple’s been handling developers for the iPhone has made me even more optimistic,” he said. “Apple’s not done anything I consider evil by restricting the apps that iPhone users can download, but it shows they’re giving the iPhone the same treatment that makes me unhappy with OS X - deciding that their way is the way a certain thing will be done.”

Others feel that Android’s openness will struggle, in such a closed environment.

“The cell phone market is one of the most closed markets I’ve ever come across - telcos often demand that cell phone makers allow them to disable features to protect their own profit margins,” Montreal consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack said. “I’m honestly not sure what a more open platform can change in the face of such blatantly anti-consumer behaviour.”

Android does have the least the potential to bring new openness to a market known for the reverse.

“I’m not a big fan of cell phones generally, but Android-style openness - if it remains as open as people hope it to be - may change my mind on that,” Lord said. “I certainly hope that it puts an end to the foolishness of people paying dollars for ringtones, or [getting] funneled into awkward and expensive picture-sending systems just to get photos off their phone. Shouldn’t every phone already allow users to drag and drop files?”

T-Mobile needs to “crow about how open the platform is,” Lord added. “It’s 2008, and I still hear people asking the questions that seemed to dog anything ‘open’ 10 or more years ago, like whether something so transparent can be safe from malicious hackers.”

Earlier this week he GNOME desktop team officially released GNOME version 2.24, which incorporates a number of bug fixes and some funky new features, including the first release of the GNOME Mobile Platform.

The GNOME Mobile Platform will be of interest to budding developers, and the GNOME team is getting ready to make virtual machine images of various mobile platforms available for improving testing.

GNOME’s Mobile Platform is integrated with a number of mobile devices, including Maemo, Ubuntu Mobile, Moblin, and Poky Linux. The devices powered by the platform range from mobile phones to netbooks to interlocking DIY Bug Labs components.

Programmers should be comfortable with the infrastructure, libraries and toolkits used in development, but there are some device specific components, such as Matchbox, that new developer’s to mobile many have not come across yet.

Although the GNOME Mobile Platform’s libraries are natively written in C, bindings from other programming languages (C++ and Python) are available and should open up the platform to a wider range of developers.

GNOME’s Mobile site details the projects missions, as well as a number if technologies and apps that the project would like to see developed, for eventual integration in to the mobile platform.

New developers are encouraged to take part by the team, and begin tyo get themselves acquainted with the community.

For the first time in British history, UK firms have been granted official permission to supply software to the public sector.

At least two open source software suppliers have been awarded places on the £80 million Software for Educational Institutions Framework, making them official suppliers to UK schools and gaining ground in what has been a drawn out battle against favouritism toward conventional software companies in UK politics and procurement.

Mark Taylor, Sirius Corporation president, one of the winning Open Source suppliers, said “We were utterly stunned. We are delighted. It’s a significant breakthrough for Open Source software.”

The United Kingdoms procurement frameworks, a fast-track process for public sector purchasers, handled £4.4bn of business in the year to April 2008. They are not supposed to prevent businesses not on the lists from selling to the public sector but, that was what has been happening, said Taylor.

“Schools would say, ‘we want this stuff, it doesn’t cost us anything and its really good’,” said Taylor. “The LA would say, ‘well the software’s not on the list, there isn’t a supplier who can supply it on the list, so you’re on your own with that.”

“So obviously there’s a reasonable amount of pressure on the schools not to,” he said.

The other open source firm is Novell UK, as confirmed by spokeswoman, Jill Henry. Novell has been on frameworks before now, but not in a capacity that would sanction its supply of open source software.

A further ten companies have been awarded places on the framework, but those names will not be released until tomorrow.

Linux IT’s managing director, Peter Dawes-Huish, said his company had pitched for a place on the framework, but withdrew when he realised he was competing for a piece of history rather than a prudent business strategy.

However, he said: “We wish Sirius very well and hope they will be very successful. It’s important not just that we support each other because we come from the same, perhaps, beliefs, in terms of the adoption of software, but it is where Mark and Sirius have their experience and we would like to see them successful.”

The Linux Foundation – the non-profit organisation that coordinates various Linux-orientated standardisation efforts and employs developers such as Linux founder Linus Torvalds - has added an individual membership, as opposed to corporate membership to the fold.

Individuals can now join through the site by paying a yearly fee that gives members a small amount of clout in Foundation issues, and a free T-shirt. Yes…

The Foundation’s vice president of marketing and developer programs, Amanda McPherson, says that although the Web-design mechanism is new, individual “affiliate” membership has been in the bylaws since the start.

“Our individual members are very important to us. The Linux community has grown to encompass individual advocates, companies, end users, and community developers. We’re working to accelerate collaboration between all of these groups, and our individual membership class is an important part of that,” she said.

The Linux Foundation was founded in 2007 when the Free Standards Group merged with Open Source Development Labs. The Foundations aim is to foster the “growth of Linux”.

Direct participation in the Foundation has always been available to corporate members, who pay fees ranging from $5,000 to $500,000. In addition to attending events and workgroups, corporate members had the right to vote on the board of directors. Platinum-level members receive a seat on the board, while gold-level members vote on an additional three seats, and silver-members vote on one seat.

If you want to be a part of the Linux Foundation then an individual affiliate membership will cost you $49 per annum. There are quite a few rules for the individual affiliate memberships;

*Affiliates do not gain the rights of full membership provided by in the Foundation bylaws. This includes the ability to start a work group or amend any bylaws.

*Affiliates do not have the right to vote as a class for “at-large directors,” and to run for at-large seats themselves. The bylaws that the affiliate can select two such at-large directors, with another chosen by the Foundations Technical Advisory Board, as well as a further two more appointed by the board itself.

And to seal the deal, affiliate members also get access to a quarterly newsletter, and their choice of three different T-shirts. Again, Yes!

The Foundation at present has eight platinum members, seven gold members, and 29 silver members. Although individual affiliate members may only have a small voice in steering the direction of the Foundation, it’s good to see the organisation become more open.

Symbian’s VP, the guy whose company who was recently absorbed by Nokia, has told a conference of industry insiders in San Francisco, that Linux is not fit for use in mobile phones.

This morning at the GigaOM:Mobilize conference Jerry Panagrossi, vice president of Symbian’s North American operations said that, “There’s been a lot of misleading information over the years…about the fitness of Linux for the mobile space,

“There has been wonderful work, fantastic work in the Linux community in the workstation and PC space, but when you drag that over into the mobile space, there is an entirely different domain with a different set of challenges that handset managers must overcome.

“This is particularly true with the resource constraints that we deal with on mobile devices - constraints in computation capability, resource and memory management, and power management. When you drill down and look at Linux…you realize it’s just a kernel.”

Panagrossi believes that in adopting Linux, mobile phone makers are pushing the industry in the wrong direction. He argues that they are creating more fragmentation, not less.

When you build a Linux phone, he says, manufacturers can’t help but move beyond the core OS.

“You quickly gravitate towards a proprietary implementation, as you add an underlying device driver model [and] you add an application execution environment.

“When you ask the Linux solution providers what percentage of software runs across all of their platforms, the answer is near zero per cent. There’s such a degree of high fragmentation in that space, and I think it’s high time we set the record straight.”

Unsurprisingly Panagrossi’s speech didn’t go down well with Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMO Foundation.

“On the question of whether Linux is suitable for mobile phones: I think that is a question that was answered four or five years ago,” Gillis said, who was sitting just to Panagrossi’s left. “We’ve introduced 23 LiMO mobile phones since we launched last year…all of the issues have been answered now.

“The real question is about access to developers. Linux is a very prevalent technology. There are something like 5 million active developers, and the other technologies rely on communities that are much, much smaller. And in Symbian’s case, nearly all of the developers will be owned by Nokia. It’s a very different situation.”

While that never really addressed Panagrossi’s point, you could argue that Symbian’s opinions are pretty irrelevant now that they will disappear in to Nokia’s vast expanse

The Shuttleworth Foundation’s Mark Surman will move to the Mozilla Foundation after he was appointed executive director, where he will continue his work in open sourcing philanthropy.

The Mozilla Foundation is an international community and open source software project that believes the internet is a public resource that must remain open and accessible to all. The organisation runs many projects, and is responsible for the development of the Firefox web browser.

“Mark’s move to Mozilla shows that our fellowship programme is working,” says Helen King, principal advisor to the Shuttleworth Foundation. “The programme aims to let people explore new ideas like open philanthropy, and then to move on to using these ideas in places that matter, such as at the Mozilla Foundation.”

King explains that through fellowships, the Shttleworth Foundation aims to work with people on the front edge of issues like open education, Knowledge and telecommunications in a way that will make a real difference.

At present there are four fellows working with the foundation; Andrew Rens in the area of intellectual property, Steve Song – telecommunications, Steve Vosloo, communications and analytical skills, and Mark Surman, open philanthropy and open education

“The fellowships emerged about 18 months ago as a way for us to make bets not only on projects, but on people too,” says King. “So far it has been successful and we have begun to see traction on key issues in terms of progressing an open knowledge society.”

Microsoft yesterday played down the dispute between them and the British Education Technology Agency over the software giant’s attempts at getting Office 2007 in to British classrooms.

In May Becta confirmed it had referred an interoperability complaint to the European Commission, claiming that Microsoft’s latest office suite contained too many restrictions to work fully with other document formats.

The group had previously accused MS of unfair licensing practices in the schools software market and made a formal complaint to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) in autumn last year. Microsoft has now announced a new Open Licensing Programme (OLP) for government that will launch at the start of next month, which should help appease the education body.

The company said the OLP offered “a new way for public sector organisations to purchase software from Microsoft resellers” who will sell MS products at a discounted rate.

Its all fair and well slashing the price, but what about the document compatibility issues?

Microsoft’s Michel Van der Bel gave Becta this statement:

“We understand that the issue of interoperability was one of the key factors underpinning Becta’s October 2007 complaint to the OFT. I look forward to continuing to work collaboratively with Becta to ensure that in implementing built-in support for ODF in Microsoft Office 2007 we meet the needs of the education sector.”

Becta responded, saying that they were pleased with Microsoft’s “clear commitment to effective interoperability and to the introduction of a pilot licensing programme”.

“Microsoft’s recent announcement of built-in support for ODF in Office 2007, and the very positive discussions we have had with them about their commitment to effective implementation,” said Becta’s Stephen Crowne.

“This will give schools and colleges additional flexibility to use a wider range of software. We will continue to work closely with Microsoft and the wider industry to maximise the benefit of ICT to our education institutions.”

Open Source Consortium founder Mark Taylor warned that education bodies should stop and think before being “fooled” by Microsoft’s new licensing program.

“Our view is that Microsoft has been forced to this position, and that the term ‘clear commitment’ should be read ‘dragged kicking and screaming’,” he said. “If not for the stance of Neelie Kroes and the European Commission, if not for the OOXML roadshow and the ISO controversy, if not for Becta’s OFT complaint, does anyone believe this would happen?

“Schools can now choose between long-term software freedom or a short-term discount on the next lock-in play.”

Sun Microsystems has launched a new website that looks to compete with Google Code and the numerous Forge sites, with its beta site Project Kenai. According to a blog post, the site was given a soft launch on Friday. The goal of the site is to host open source projects and encourage collaboration on them.

The Kenai Project is built on Ruby on Rails, and uses Subversion and Mercurial version-control systems and according to the Project Kenai site, it will be “more than a Forge.”

“We built it because we needed it, but it’s open for use by the world for free,” says project engineer Nick Sieger.

“Kenai is a recognition by Sun that, as the largest open source company in the world, we need to take control of our own destiny. We need a place to nurture and grow our open source communities that we ourselves can control; we need to demonstrate credibility in building on top of more traditional LAMP/SAMP web stacks (not just Java EE); and we need to show viability of Sun technologies and hardware for next-generation web applications,” he said

He continued, “By launching, I think we’re well on the way toward showing progress toward those goals. Where we go from here is going to be a blend of what the community asks of us and our own ideas for what we think would be cool new features to build on top of a collaboration portal that no one else has done yet.”

Project Kenai is likely to compete closely with Github. Git, written by Linux Torvalds has become an increasingly popular version-control system.

You can find much more on the servers and infrastructure behind Kenai at tbray.org. Sieger has already responded to the heat he has taken for the use of the word “control,” in explaining Kenai.

Everyone seems to love Mozilla’s (awesome IMO) browser, Firefox, but a number of users have been getting their panties in a twist following the development work on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). In the latest Ubuntu packages, Firefox requires a EULA (End-User License Agreement) to be accepted the first time you launch the browser. The EULA mostly deals with agreeing to Mozilla’s trademark policies for Firefox.

A few disgruntled users are unhappy about the EULA, with many believing it is an irrelevant licence, and that mandating this EULA is going too far.

Ubuntu’s founder, Mark Shuttleworth commented extensively on the matter:

“Mozilla Corp asked that this be added in order for us to continue to call the browser Firefox. Since Firefox is their trademark, which we intend to respect, we have the choice of working with Mozilla to meet their requirements, or switching to an unbranded browser.

“It’s strongly our preference, and that of most of our users, to have Firefox as the browser in Ubuntu.

“I think it’s perfectly reasonable for Mozilla to have requirements and guidelines for the use of their trademark - we have the same for Ubuntu, and many other free software projects do the same. I would in fact consider it a best practice to have a good brand on a free software project, which means having trademark guidelines.

“That said, I would not consider an EULA as a best practice. It’s unfortunate that Mozilla feels this is absolutely necessary, but they do, and none of us are in a position to be experts about the legal constraints which Mozilla feels apply to them. We had extensive conversations with Mozilla in order to find the best possible way of meeting their requirements while preserving the flow of use of the system for our users.

“Please feel free to make constructive suggestions as to how we can meet Mozilla’s requirements while improving the user experience. It’s not constructive to say “WTF?”, nor is it constructive to rant and rave in allcaps. Your software freedoms are built on legal grounds, as are Mozilla’s rights in the Firefox trademark. To act as though your rights are being infringed misses the point of free software by a mile.

“I believe we have a new package in Intrepid, called abrowser, which uses the codebase behind Firefox without invoking the Firefox trade mark.”

Shuttleworths statement hasn’t tamed the many free software idealists and the outcry will continue for some time. For any users that can’t handle the Firefox licence and its ‘tight grip on your freedom?’ then maybe they should switch to a trademark-free web browser or abandon Ubuntu entirely and switch to the Ubuntu-based but FSF-approved gNewSense.

Linden Lab, the creator of virtual world ‘Second Life’, acknowledged the accomplishments of the open source community this week at its Linden Lab Innovation Awards. The “Mixed Reality” ceremony awarded seven winners at a convention centre in Florida, as well as on Second Life.

This is the second time this event has taken place, and Linden Lab’s head of open source development Rob Lanphier took the stand to present the awards, at the Second Life Community Convention (SLCC). A panel of six judges selected the winners, who each received a “Hippo Award” prize package.

Judges chose two winners in the Best Documentation category. Asuka Neely and Gally Young were awarded for their contributions translating volumes of Second Life wiki documentation into Japanese and French, respectively.

The Best Community Organiser category was spilt in to two areas, one went to Tao Takahi for Best Working Group Organiser for his contributions to the Second Life Architecture Working Group (AWG) ,who are the group that pusses to standardise the protocols and data formats used in the system to make them interproperable with other virtual worlds. The other award went to Harleen Gretzky was recognised as Best Issue Tracker Organiser for her work on PJIRA, the projects issue tracker.

Mm Adler was awarded the Best Code Contribution award, for her voice-to-lip synching model, that was described by Lanphier as “tidy and thoughtful in its execution”.

The Jesse Malthus Award for Best Community Influence - named in memory of a respected Second Life developer and community member who died last year – went to Lex Neva, who was singled out not only for making significant contributions to issue tracking on PJIRA, but also for maintaining “constructive and thoughtful” commentary and dialog within the Second Life community.

The final award went to Michelle Zenovka, for Contributor of the Year, for her code contributions in transmitting the Second Life viewer to CMake, and bringing up the Linux viewer client up to scratch with the Windows and Mac OS X builds.

Nominations for the awards are open to the community.