PlexNex

LINUX: Enterprise Engagement, the Missing Link

Free Sofware developers -- in their daily focus -- are commited to making the software GOOD. Free Software companies -- according to their own moral imparative -- are commited to making the software USEFUL.

That the two objectives don't wholly overlap is a source of frisson between Free Software individuals and the Free Software's corporate sponsors. Maybe this is healthy in itself, or an opportunity waiting to be leveraged.

Perhpas it's time for the Free Software community as a whole to think about the role and value that Free Software companies bring to the ecosystem.

In a BBC News thought-piece, Bill Gates recently made a revealing comment ...

"Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs."

This is a veiled criticism of Free Software. He's talking about his software business -- where he often conflates software technology assembly with the organization of people in his business dedicated to solving customers' problems and making alternatives look unattractive.

The quote is difficult to fault as a business statement, since they have proven adept at doing the whole package. But it doesn't account for the superior code produced by both isolated and collaborative work across the Free Software ecosystem.

Mr Gates visualizes the Free Software developer -- the Hobbyist, for whom his distain is on record -- as an anti-social being (see in section, "Non-Assertion of Patents Pledge," the definition of " Non-Compensated Individual Hobbyist Developer"), having long hair, bad breath and working alone in a garret. He can't be entirely wrong because he was a software hobbyist, himself, back in the 1970s -- closely fitting that description.

Free Software doesn't actually suffer from a lack of collaboration on the code. It suffers in the market-place -- that bazaar of products -- from an almost comprehensive lack of collaboration with business.

A few years ago, I thought it was an embarrassment that the bellwether GNU/Linux company, Red Hat, had only passed the $100-million total revenue mark. Given the size of the enterprise and consumer software markets, that number was just ... well, embarrassing.

Just this week, we read with a mixture of amusement, glee and ennui that Novell, having got its reporting methods checked off by the SEC, reported 4th Quarter revenue from Open Platform Solutions (which includes Linux) at $23 million, up 69% versus the year-ago quarter.

Even though Novell's Linux invoicings (something different than accounting revenues) were up 108% in the period, suggesting an annualized Linux billing-rate well beyond $100 million, it is fairly depressing that the company with the very best enterprise GNU/Linux desktop, plus some good identity, messaging and deployment/management products makes as much money in one Quarter as Microsoft makes in a few minutes.

Evidently, GNU/Linux's enterprise penetration today is so minimal that it is hard sometimes to see why Microsoft bothers to oppose it. (Or is it attributable to the monopoly's effectiveness in opposition?) This means that GNU/Linux does not have a depth or breadth of conversations under weigh with corporate IT departments -- the innovative, feedback kind of conversations that Mr Gates rightly prizes.

How is this going to change if not slowly? Progress seems glacial today in light of the Free Software community's apparent and general disinterest in business and willingness to abuse sincere, if controversial, efforts to compete. The small amount of business in the commercial Free Software space makes it hard to attract bright people. The space seems incompatible with innovation. (I'm not convinced it's merely due to monopoly conditions.)

Experience working and solving enterprise customers' problems breeds experience. Solutions as well as sales, deployment & integration knowledge improve in a cumulative way.

I wrote last year in the Financial Times about the more prominent GNU/Linux migration case studies in Europe: the Gendarmes, Munich and PSA Peugeot Citroen. PSA is a Novell customer and the migration of 40% of that car company's desktops to SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 is a pivotal case for Novell and for the GNU/Linux desktop in general.

Christophe Therry, Novell general manager for France, explained: "Peugeot was impressed with the translucent 3D desktop, with the user-interface functionality and was looking for a way to facilitate the path through the user-adoption curve."

Peugeot is a Lotus Notes and SAP house; these enterprise applications must integrate seamlessly. Peugeot and Novell convinced IBM to port Lotus Notes to Linux (which IBM had no prior intention of doing), and this was accomplished for Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 in just two months. (IBM and Novell are now cross-marketing Notes 8 on Novell's SLED 10 Linux desktop.) Novell was able to feed back Peugeot's requirements into SLED 10, for which Mr Therry credits Peugeot's culture.

Working together they improved SLED 10's wireless security making it possible, for example, for a laptop's connection to move from one domain server to another while maintaining security.

They improved Linux's ability to integrate securely in a Windows environment; and added coding improvements to the Firefox browser on Linux which make it possible for the internal websites to conform to the exotic requirements of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser when such pages are viewed on any platform.

Some Free Software developers -- perhaps those operating from their garrets -- may ask, "Why do we need to commercialize Linux? It's fine as it is. It solves all my problems!" It's a fair question, for which we need a fair answer. Even Linus Torvalds has commented about virtualization, for example, 'I don't care ... I'm just not that interested in it.' We are glad they are so focused on the problems that are important to them; it has made the software GOOD.

Yet PSA Peugeot Citroen represents the kind of enterprise engagement that is not only healthy for GNU/Linux but essential to making it USEFUL. Through the engagement, key customer-recommended features get added or adjusted within the software, and the collaboration with the end user helps Novell address problems of integration or of interoperability that are outside the GNU/Linux code-base (and therefore not typically identified as problems). Thanks to the quality and the efficiency of developer collaboration around the GNU/Linux code, the inside work on GNU/Linux is so advanced today that it is largely these outside problems which present the more significant obstacles to adoption.

Mr Gates is right about software innovation, but he's the wrong person to say it. Enterprise engagement by commercial Free Software companies is critical if GNU/Linux is to be useful as well as good. And we need more of it.

NYSE | Euronext: Bullish on Linux

Why does this heavy transaction-throughput, high-uptime, fault-tolerant customer prefer Linux (even over Solaris)?

"What we want is to be able to take advantage of technology advances when they happen," Rubinow said. "We're trying to be as independent of any technologies as we can be."

This is what I call "Zero Procurement"; it's about the customer deploying Free Software on his own schedule, and even taking on some of the cost of testing, configuration and integration.

The kinds of software problems IT vendors can usefully solve tend to be generic (universal or commodity problems). Whereas the kinds of software problems the heavy-compute buy-side can solve for themselves tend to differentiate their business.

Hardware is a different story.

Microsoft Modus Gets Smoked in Nigeria

Microsoft bribery gets reversed in Nigeria ...

ComputerWorldUK | "Linux wins Nigerian school desktops back from Microsoft" | Jeremy Kirk for the IDG News Service (9 Nov 2007)

Bunch o' criminals!

FT: "Putting Linux on Desktops"

"Did IT work: Putting Linux on desktops" | Sam Hiser | Financial Times (7 Nov 2007)

Update in today's FT print edition of the three prominent Linux migrations in Europe...

• The Gendarmerie
• City of Munich
• PSA Peugeot Citroën

Flight to the GPL(v3)

It's an astute assessment by Pieter at FFII, in the aftermath of Neelie Kroes' capitulation to Microsoft ...

So, Microsoft has decided to bleed the GPL economy dry by:

1. Fragmenting the Linux economy by making patent deals with Linux vendors - TurboLinux, Xandros, and of course, Novell.
2. Starting a proxy-troll patent attack on Red Hat, the leading Linux distributor (it has also attacked Novell but that is probably so that it can ride to Novell's defense). Red Hat refused to make a deal, now it will pay the price.
3. Splitting the open source community away from the free software community, by re-branding itself as an "open source" firm.
4. Announcing that it wants to buy open source firms. Money is the greatest divider ever.
5. Bringing open source projects into its franchise, where they will get protection from Microsoft's patents, in return for using Microsoft's open source licenses.

It's a desperate scheme, because it's guaranteed to backfire in the worst possible way, and surely Microsoft cannot be naive enough to think it'll work.

Here is how Microsoft's plan to kill the GPLv3 is going to backfire.

1. It's going to bring large numbers of people into the "no software patents" camp. Up to now, it's not been clear to most people just how damaging the EPO's practice of allowing software patents has been. The FFII has been saying for a while, "software patents trump anti-trust" but few have understood, until now.
2. It's going to end the license wars. Microsoft have set the stage for a mass migration to, not away from, the GPLv3. Why? Because open source projects that get too close to the beast will shrivel and die like grapes on hot coals.
3. It's going to focus the wrath of an entire community against Microsoft. For the last decade or so, Redmond have not really messed with the FOSS world and the FOSS world has mostly ignored Redmond, apart from a lot of taunting and name-calling. Now, that has changed.

The future of open source and free software will look like this: first, Microsoft will pump money into its franchiseware economy and get very little back. Second, IBM will do the same with its own franchiseware economy (the Apache Foundation) and get a lot more back, because IBM actually understand how this works. Last, all remaining projects will move to the GPL, with a few exceptions. And it's that economy, the one based on formal copyleft licenses, and backed by increasing determination to litigate and defend against litigation, that will prevail.

Microsoft's American Proxy Patent War Continues

A made-up thing, a company called "IP Innovation LLC", is suing Red Hat & Novell for something which sounds like the virtual desktop implementation in Linux (which I personally treasure as a productivity godsend -- and which is enabled by Linux's true multi-threading, multi-tasking might...Windows can't implement virtual desktop because, underneath, Windows code is a complex tangle of spaghetti lacking in Linux's Unix-provenance as a real OS).

PJ & Company astutely make the connection that behind "IP Innovation LLC" is a group called Acacia which is staffed by senior Microsoft agents, including Jonathan Taub, a Microsoft Hero & Key Achiever.

The Microsoft Cross-Marketing & Interoperability Pact with Novell says that Microsoft and Novell pledge not to sue each other or each other's customers for ostensible patent infringements. "IP Innovation LLC" is a shadow Microsoft hitsquad. Therefore, Novell is aware now that Microsoft is in breach of their deal.

The drama continues and Linux keeps getting more important and easier to implement -- outside the USA.

CIOs -- this has become too transparent. Aren't you fed up yet?

ceteris parabis, this patent trolling by Microsoft is immoral, unethical and hypocritical. It will surely cause Asians, Europeans, Oceanians, Antarcticans, Africans & S. Americans to laugh at the self-defeating innovation-constipation in North America.

Shuttleworth & Co. on OpenSeason

Ashlee Vance hosts a fun & informative chat with Mark Shuttleworth on OpenSeason. Also attending: Matt Asay & Dave Rosenberg.

Audio (MP3) over an hour. Run in the background while you waste time on Facebook.

Linux's New Plateau

Larry Magid writes a complete piece on Linux in The New York Times.

In particular, the picture -- bright & beautiful above the fold of the regular Thursday Circuits section -- tells of Linux's new place of prominence, despite its still small share of the market.

MP3 phone interview with Larry (5:52).

Package Management, or Bust

Read Ian Murdock's brief, "How package management changed everything" and understand why Vista sucks.

Ian is bringing key open source principles to Sun to help Solaris become real. Excellent hire. I do hope he's getting paid; he'll save the franchise.

What to Do in NYC in a Snow Storm

Tomorrow (Wed, Feb 14, 2007) 4:00 - 5:00p on the Linux Desktop track at the Linuxworld Open Solutions Summit (Mariott Marquis, 1535 Broadway at Times Square), Don Marti will host a panel with myself, Ian Murdock & Jeremy White.

We'll probably be talking about the current state of Desktop Linux, where it is, where it isn't and what's still holding it back. Don will have some really good questions, so I'm as eager as anyone to find out where we are at.

For attendees of the conference I'd like to provide a few suggestions about things to do when you're in New York. There's supposed to be a few inches of snow, so my suggestion is bring your goloshes, Wellies or what have you and plan to walk through the slush if you leave your hotel -- since traffic will be unmerciful.

If weather is milder than expected (more than likely), Plan B would be to find a cozy bar restaraunt and hunker down. (It's been in the high-20s, Farenheit, this week, and should not get much over the mid-30s with the snow, not a lot colder.)

If you're feeling adventurous, there are two events here in town that I would recommend unreservedly: a broadway show that's way better than most, and a portrait exhibition that's unbelievable.

GREAT ENTERTAINMENT IN NEW YORK

Go see Company...

Ethel Barrymore Theatre
243 W. 47th St. (between Broadway & Eighth Ave.)
(212) 239-6200

Ben Brantley's review in The New York Times...

This visually severe, aurally lush reinvention of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's era-defining musical of marriage and its discontents from 1970 is the chicest-looking production on Broadway.

What we noticed is the musical talent on stage. Remarkable! Let me just say also that Raul Esperanza is excellent (he was great as Caracticus Potts in the (Albert) Broccoli's Broadway production (i.e., James Bond) of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, too).

Expect ticket prices of $45 to $85, and a superb value at that. Box office walk-ups should be no problem.

For background, DA Pennebaker (Monterrey Pop, Bob Dylan's Don't Look Back) filmed a documentary in 1970 after the original Company got its good reviews of the making of the Company original cast recording. It is a typically Cinema Verite' Pennebaker treatment of an 18-hour recording marathon which ends in a cliff-hanger as the stars, Elaine Stritch and Dean Jones, hit the wall in their climactic numbers -- with Sondheim featured as the anxious mid-wife to his own baby.

Company: Original Cast Album

Get this!

Alternatively, get yourselves to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Fifth Ave & 85th St., the large edifice on the left) for...

"Glitter and Doom: German Portraits of the 1920's"

The title is an understatement. This is the work of Otto Dix, Max Beckman, George Grosz and other painters of the Weimar Republic period between the wars (I and II) when Germany was thrown into social, political & economic chaos after the overthrow of the monarchy at the end of World War I (1919).

Otto Dix, "To Beauty" (1922)

Otto Dix, "Skat Players" (1920)

For me these portraits throw all of the 20th Century into clear focus and answer the question, among others, where did Adolf Hitler really come from.

You'll get in here for something like $12 and the food is good, too, at the Met.

GoogleOS...NOT!

Ian -- as in debIAN -- puts an end to speculation about Google being in the operating systems business.

Releasing yet another Linux distribution isn’t disruptive—redefining what an operating system is is disruptive, and Google’s already doing that.

Cause or Effect?

...some welcome from Verizon DSL (click to enlarge image).

Trying to activate my new DSL account from Linux brought sad tidings from the phone company. Even Firefox got the block: both Windows and IE6 or higher are required.

Naive, reactionary open source hot-heads like to blame Tech Support innocents for non-support. But this is a classic chicken & egg situation, symptomatic of a weak performance in the market-place.

If Linux would make even a decent showing, ISPs and hardware vendors (like Linksys, Netgear, Belkin & Dell) could justify the significant costs of adding an additional platform to their support menus.

According to the marketing truism of "Seven Impressions," Linux will need 7 really big enterprise or national education adoptions and a long tail of small businesses pestering ISPs & vendors before they will add to their support cost-centers. It's simple math. In market share, Desktop Linux will need to match Mac, which seems to be pulling away.

Where are you Linux? Is anybody home? ANYBODY? 

Linux & Competition

Just look at this set of Linux screenshots brought to us kindly by The Coding Studio. The amount of Linux distros is impressive, and the quality looks much improved over the past year.

There is even a tidy little distro called KateOS that comes across as a system developed by a 12-year-old hacker-gurl but which has some very smart design parameters, principally around keeping it lightweight and runable on older hardware.

Look how Ubuntu, for one, is flourishing: the result of Debian's conservative and uncompromising philosophy means its communities are far richer than, for example, the commercial Linux distros exemplified by Red Hat or Novell/SuSE. You might imagine those two dying on the vine by comparison to the vibrant energy around Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is thriving like rabbits (click on the images)...

Ubuntu - the basic GNOME distro

Kubuntu - the basic KDE distro

Edubuntu - the special distro for education

Fluxbuntu - a lightweight distro

Nubuntu - the security distro

Xubuntu - the X-only no-frills distro

Withall this variety, Linux (Desktop Linux) still has only a small market share. While certain statistical collection points (the Market Share site by Net Applications) gather that Windows market share is somewhere over 90 percent, and Mac is almost 4 percent, they have Linux below 1 percent. A different source suggests Mac share is higher: here's an exellent article from a different vantage about the recent steady MacOSX market share gains: accordingly, OS X market share is right now between 4 and 5 percent.

Windows has the monopoly enterprise and OEM channel lock-ins. Mac is differentiating itself with the superior interface, media handling and iPod/iTunes integration. Mac should be the newly definitive choice for the student, home and for publishing & artistic use; its consistent year-on-year market share increases of 20-plus percent each month this year reflect that. Linux seems to be consolidating its dominance of the geek, hacker and hobbyist market strata, which should keep it below 2 or 3 percent into perpetuity. What looks at a glance like new competition in the OS market is not competition at all: all these beautiful colors of Ubuntu and the other choices from Alinux to ZenLive Linux are competing with themselves and not against Mac, nor against Windows.

There's a widespread belief in the Linux communities that Ease of Installation is a key requirement. It's key for individuals but completely irrelevant to enterprise. It's a myth because in the desktop software markets that matter -- the mainstream markets -- not a single customer ever, EVER installs their operating system. Linux will not be credible in the mainstream until the problems with media formats and DVD are solved (total integration) or until a distro will take the pains to certify for specific models of motherboards or fully built OEM PCs. And Linux will not break out until it is clearly differentiated from the user point of view.

There are other, orthogonal, areas by which free software interests don't even seem troubled. To break into the mainstream, we will need to focus and deliver on three important things...

1.    a viable open standard file format for documents

2.    a viable Outlook / Exchange / Sharepoint solution

3.    a viable solution for document collaboration & business process integration

On the first item, ODF is 10% to its mark; on the second, if Scalix is the answer then we're completely fucked and we'll need to fall back to Gmail Enterprise; on the third item if Alfresco or Zimbra are the answer, then we have some more sprinting to do.

These three areas need to be ten, perhaps twenty, times more tightly integrated and idiot-proofed than the value proposition of Vista.

Perhaps, lads, it's not going to be our decade after all. I'm sorry to be so negative, but do you see the winning mentality anywhere? ANYWHERE? (...present company of Robertson and Shuttleworth excluded.)

Vista Delay: Time for Dell to Wear the Pants

Of course the Vista/Office delay is serious. From Phl Sim, Squash:

Is Microsoft stuggling with Vista? Abso-farking-lutely. Not hitting that pre-Christmas deadline is one of, if not the BIGGEST screw-ups in Microsoft history. You cannot possibly underestimate how much angst this is going to cause Microsoft’s hardware partners. You cannot possibly underestimate how much this is going to ruin Microsoft’s Vista marketing plans.

With this delay, Microsoft has pretty much single-handedly ruined Christmas for the PC industry. The single-biggest season for PC sales will flop because nobody is going to buy a PC when a new OS is just around the corner. I’m sure Microsoft and its PC partners will offer free Vista upgrades to people who buy Christmas PCs but that’s not going to be enough. Hell, do you want to go through that upgrade process when you can wait a couple of months and have it pre-installed. No way!

Dell in particular with the deepest Microsoft co-dependency will be raging. Impossible to contain their angst & fury to be told to walk away from Christmas 2006.

This is time for Dell people to strap on the trousers for the first time. The opportunity is perfect to announce a commitment to 2 or 3 leading Linux distros. The excuses Michael Dell has made lately about everybody wanting different distros and there being too many to support is delusional, utter chicken-shit!

If you need a template for your Linux division, go see our friend Lincoln Durey at Emperor Linux.

Dell: now's the time to Grow Up!

Linux Needs a Product Placement

If Desktop Linux wants to get across The Chasm, it needs product placements in TV shows and movies. Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu/Canonical, Linspire, OSDL and whoever feels a sense of responsibility should be pooling funds to make the media buys. Where are you all?

The shows need to be not for geeks, the characters need to be sexy. Linux needs to be shown in the normal household setting being used as a normal, if not obvious, option...in situ.

Little money needs to be spent and the intiative could start on deep cable if necessary.

When is Linux marketing going to aspire to the starting line?

Financial Times: On Mark Shuttleworth

Ben King does a thorough treatment on Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical & Ubuntu in the Financial Times (print edition) today, truncated on the Web.

The only news to Linux-watchers will be the globetrotting pace Mark has set for himself to sign up accounts for the Ubuntu desktop. His message is modest: bluster is absent and he only emphasizes that the Canonical/Ubuntu project is characterized by high risk. There's no telling, he says, if Ubuntu will be a marginal 2-percenter or a mother-of-all-desktops 50-percenter.

Getting Ubuntu across The Chasm is the trick. But I will tell you that no Linux effort matches Canonical/Ubuntu in its common sense approach to The Chasm, husbanding resources and focusing energy on emerging locales like South- and West-African townships where poverty and fragmented langauge cultures have been impenetrable for the expensive, mainstream desktop.

It remains to be seen if a form of Ubuntu is the targeted system for the Little Green Laptop. This would make sense given The Shuttleworth Foundation's commitments to So. Africa tribal language localization, and also because our trusted acquaintance, Canonical's Mako Hill, is a member of the MIT Media Lab. 

The reason the Little Green Laptop is one of the most interesting stories through the rest of this decade is that Negroponte's project could single-handedly double the global installed base of Internet-connected PC devices within a few short years. Given the fact that Linux will run on that little hand-cranked system, Microsoft's share of installed systems goes down to 50% in a sharp-ish manner. What's more, the Little Green Laptop, if OpenOffice is the suite of choice, will make OpenDocument the 50% global file format. Add to this scenario the number of state or regional govenments following in the footsteps of The Commonwealth of Massachusetts' Peter Quinn and we can begin to visualize a better world for ICT systems and the flow of information.